


Null Space

by Mundivore



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Deep Space Survival, Deep space, Drama, Friendship, Fusion, Gen, Injury, POV Third Person Omniscient, Peril, Survival, think Steven Universe meets The Martian meets Star Trek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2019-11-03 20:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17884913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mundivore/pseuds/Mundivore
Summary: Lost in space? Check. Can't phone home? Check. Cursed ship that wants them dead? Double-check.Some checklists are nicer when you can leave them blank.Updates every other Saturday.





	1. Chapter 1

The alarm klaxxon sounded, and everyone groaned audibly.

“Come  _ on _ ,” Connie mumbled. “What is it this time?”

Peridot navigated her control-screen with what would have been the unmitigated deftness of a consummate professional, but was instead quite mitigated, as the ship’s onboard computer spent a good three to four seconds chewing on each request made before finally giving up an answer.

“Uhh…” she muttered. “…Oh, curses! It’s the rear-front port-side warp-detangler. We’re going to veer left when we exit warp space! We’ll have to make a new warp to compensate for the sway this time.”  

“Does that mean—” Steven started, before Peridot cut him off in a huff.

“Yes, it means we have to exit warp again,” she snapped. “Again! This is ridiculous!”

She glanced back to where Steven was sitting, hung her head, and sighed.

“Sorry, Steven.”

“No, it’s okay,” he reassured. “I get it, it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for us, too. But uh… you can be frustrated without getting snargly.”

Connie yawned, nodding in agreement.

“At least we’ll be able to get out of these chairs,” she said, glancing down at the five or so belts strapping her in place. “I’ve been on uncomfortable road trips, but this is something else.”

“The more I hear about this ‘road trips,’ the less I want to participate,” Peridot muttered as she began pressing buttons again. “It just sounds like a more mobile form of bondage.”

Connie snickered a little while Steven made a little sound of protest.

“Peridot! First of all,  _ rude _ . And second of all, road trips are fun!” he declared. “I’ll show you for sure when we get back.”

“I dunno,” Connie said. “Whenever I’ve gone on a road trip with my family, I find myself looking forward to every bathroom stop. I get carsick when I read on the highway.”

“Well, that’s your problem,” Steven said. “You aren’t supposed to read on a road trip!”

“Of course not,” Peridot cackled as she worked. “That would be a form of escape.”

Connie snorted, while Steven looked outright offended.

“Ugh, come on!” Connie tugged against her chair, groaning. “I just want out of my seat. Can I drop us out of warp? I think I’ve seen you do it enough times. Like, three. In the last six hours.”

“I’ve got things well under control, Connie,” Peridot declared.

“It’s not about that,” Steven said, stepping in to support his friend. “Like, what if you have to take us out of warp, and do something else at the same time? It’d be easier if one of us could help you with that.”

“Hmm…” Peridot stroked her chin. “True…”

“And, I could say to people that I kind-of know how to fly a spaceship! I’d be like, spaceship vice-captain!”

“Well,” Peridot declared. “Since you have so reasonably framed the situation,  _ I _ ,  _ Captain _ Peridot, shall allow it. But only, with my guidance. So, where do you think we begin,  _ Vice-Captain? _ ”  

Connie laughed quietly before pointing at her dashboard.

“I think we start with the button that your translator program labeled ‘unwarp.’”

“…Very astute!” Peridot said, blushing slightly as she looked imperiously upon Connie, still reveling in her Captaincy. “What next, then?”

“That’s it, right?”

“Not so!” Captain Peridot declared in her captain-voice. “We must then… unfasten our restrictor straps!”

“I think that comes after we drop out of warp, Captain,” Steven said, grinning.

“I believe… that may be the case.” Peridot muttered captainly into her fingers.

“So… press the button?” Connie asked.

“Make it so!”

The jolly mood continued for about half a second after Connie pushed her button. Then, they were reminded of the absolute junker of a vessel that they’d been forced to commandeer. The ship shook audibly, making horrendous groaning noises as it came out of faster-than-light speed unevenly. Visible through the window, the port-side ‘wing’ of the ship wiggled and twisted like firm grass under a gentle breeze. A relaxing thing for grass to do. A less relaxing thing for metal to do.

They were aboard the  _ Molten Core _ , a vessel slated for the junkyard at the time they… acquired it. It was a long story, but in short, they had taken the ship in order to serve as a distraction for an operation that involved dealing with a particularly hostile Hessonite. Originally, the  _ Sun Incinerator  _ was going to pick them up shortly after the mission, but plans had shifted. A flaw in the  _ Molten Core _ ’s navigation system—which Peridot eventually corrected, making colorful additions to Steven and Connie’s vocabulary in the process—had caused them to miss the rendezvous point. Fortunate coincidence also meant that they’d missed their pursuers, but it added up to the same thing: the  _ Molten Core _ would have to take them home.

Eventually, the starfield settled to static, and the three of them took a sigh of relief.

“With any luck,” Peridot said, beginning the process of unclipping her seatbelts. “This next warp should be our last one. Approximately four hours to Earth after we get going.”

“Ugh,” Connie groaned.

“I thought it was five hours left, like, two hours ago,” Steven complained.

“It  _ was _ ,” Peridot said, slightly cross. “Dropping out of warp costs time, even if we’re only going to spend a few minutes out.”

“Like getting back up to highway speed,” Connie muttered, as she fiddled with the last of her buckles.

“There’s not much point in getting out of your seats,” Peridot groused. “We’ll be leaving in less than five minutes, and I can do everything from this seat.”

“Why are  _ you  _ unbuckling, then?” Steven asked, still fastened tight in his seat.

“I’m just—” Peridot flustered, then groaned. “Flying with these restrictor straps is like being stuck in the ground a second time. It’s so… ugh, so cramped!”

“I’m with Peridot,” Connie said, stretching and yawning. “I think you’re outnumbered on the roadtrip issue, Steven.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m smaller,” he figured, grunting as he pushed at his console to rotate his chair towards the other two. Of the two co-pilot positions, he’d taken the one to the right of Peridot. “I’m getting a bit hungry, though. How are we on food?”

“More than enough,” Connie said, walking over to the compartment in the back she’d stashed her backpack in. “I talked my dad into getting some military surplus this time, so I’ve got about a dozen Meals-Ready-to-Eat with me.”

“Pearl and Amethyst have told me very different stories of this ‘eating’ business,” Peridot said, standing up to manipulate her console. “It’s the similarities that disturb me.”

“We all have to get our energy somewhere,” Connie said, rifling through her bag. “Here, Steven, catch. Buttered rice, freeze-dried meat, and other sundries.”

“Sounds good!” Steven said, before fumbling his catch royally. “Aw. Fooh.”

Connie giggled.

“I’ll grab it before I sit back down, Steven. Say, Peridot,” she ventured as she selected herself a ‘taco’ MRE. She doubted its taco-ness. “Where do gems get their energy, anyways?”

“Mostly, we collect light with our gems. About seventy percent of our energy needs come from there,” Peridot said. “But our gems also directly generate some power, too, so we don’t go totally dormant if we’re left in the dark, or out in deep space.”

“Mm.”

Connie nodded and hummed as she roamed back to her seat, handing Steven’s meal up to him, for which she received a kind thanks.

“Hey, Peridot. Mind doing the thing?” Connie hopped into her seat and pressed a button that caused around a half-dozen belts to reach out of the chair and fasten her into place.

“What?” Peridot groaned. “That’s going to take two whole minutes!”

“I just want to be sure,” Connie said. “Didn’t you say I’d splatter if this chair broke?”

“It’s been  _ perfectly _ functional the last million times we’ve checked.” Peridot grumbled, lumbering over to perform chair-diagnostics. “I don’t see why it’d change now.”

“Thanks for doing it, anyway,” Connie smiled. “I appreciate being non-splattered.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Peridot grunted as the chair gave an affirmative chirp. “I appreciate it, too. I’m not checking mine, though.”

“You probably should—”

“We should probably be dead by now, Steven!” she complained. “ _ Dead _ ! So I’ll live with an uninspected chair.” 

“Honestly, these chairs are really good,” Steven said. “They’re way more comfortable getting into warp than the first ship I warped in.”

“What? That Roaming Eye?” Peridot raised an eyebrow. “That thing should have been smoother than mutter!”

“Butter,” Connie corrected.

“Butter,” Peridot continued as she began to strap herself in. “Roaming Eyes have the same protections against the warp field as these chairs do, only across the whole ship! They’re dedicated rapid-response and scout vessels, so they were some of the first Homeworld ships to incorporate that tech. It’s pretty standard now, but… huh.”

Steven shrugged. “It was pretty nice on the way back, but on the way there we didn’t… I dunno, set things up correctly? I got pressed really hard into the chair, and all the gems disappeared without poofing—”

“Wait, wait, no no no,” Peridot interrupted, resetting the warp as she talked. “You are  _ not _ telling me you just… walked off a ninety-percent unmitigated warp. Your puny human organs should have been all over everywhere!”

“I mean, it hurt for an hour or two,” Steven said, shrugging. “Not fun.”

With a gentle lurch, the  _ Molten Core _ kicked into motion again, the starfield slowly blurring out as the ship accelerated towards and past superluminal effective velocity.

“Well, all that stuff about unmitigated warps would explain one thing,” Connie said, picking at the packaging of her meal. “This MRE is  _ definitely _ flatter than it was when I bought it.”

The ship shuddered as it continued to kick up the pace.

“Probably,” Peridot grunted. “Honestly, I’m not sure if Steven’s just special, or if humans are. Maybe they’re… I dunno, built for warps. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve seen on Earth.”

“I volunteer not to be a test subject, please,” Connie decided.

Steven agreed.

“It’s not really any fun at all,” he said.

“Well, fine,” Peridot mumbled, finally finding the will to smile. “Leave all the science to me, you boring flesh-sophonts.”

“I’m only half flesh-sophont, actually,” Steven said, raising his finger.

Peridot snickered, before the cockpit fell quiet again. Aside from the muted sounds of Steven and Connie eating and the groaning of the ship accelerating, there was near-complete silence for several minutes.

“You know,” Steven said, breaking the silence. “I hate to admit it, but this is a  _ really _ sucky road trip.”

Connie laughed so hard that her meal nearly went up her nose, and Peridot’s pensive look swelled into a grin.

“No, I’m serious!” Steven laughed, gesturing in front of them. “Like, where’s the scenery?”

“Right?” Connie mumbled through food. “It’s like, a road trip without the road.”

“I see a road! Behold!” Peridot gestured to the point of darkness in the middle of the starfield. “A strip of meaningless blackness, stretching out before us forever! Many may follow in our path, but few will care.”

“Roads aren’t meaningless,” Steven said. “They’re like… the places people travel on! They’re busy, not empty, like this.”

“Okay, so we’re off-roading,” Connie said, then paused and was seized with a fit of giggling. “No, actually, it’s  _ exactly _ like a road trip with my dad! If you unbuckle, you  _ die! _ ”

“Actually, only you’d die,” Peridot amended cheerfully, spinning her chair idly. “My form would just lag behind, but the chair would keep my gem from hitting anything. And apparently Steven is made of …invincibility-garbage or something, because I don’t know why he wouldn’t be. But he says he’d be fine, too.”

“You say that like you blame me,” Steven chuckled under his breath, shaking his head.

“Frankly, I do,” Peridot spun her chair to face Steven, crossing her arms with a grin. “It’s pretty much just unfair how powerful you are.”

“Yeah…” Steven trailed off, drooping a bit.

“Ah! No, I didn’t mean it like that! It was a joke!” Peridot stammered, turning back to Connie. “Help! I fox-passed—”

“Faux pas’d?” Connie corrected with a bit of uncertainty.

“That!”  

“No, it’s alright, it’s alright,” Steven said, laughing a little. “I was kind of joking, too.”

“Oh, thank the stars,” Peridot said, breathing a sigh of relief. She spun several times before laughing a little. “For a second, I’d almost thought I’d done something wrong!”

Something in Peridot’s chair gave, and it locked up, facing backwards.

“Uh-oh,” she said, blanching.

_ Snnap, _ the chair replied.

Faster than either Steven or Connie’s eyes could follow, Peridot slipped forward through her bonds, her body no longer solid enough to be restrained as some critical component in the warpseat failed. At light-speeds, her body fell through the bulkheads of the ship into the empty black beyond, but Connie and Steven could not see that. They were limited to merely what they could see, and what they could hear.

_ Crack-crk-clack _ , Peridot’s gemstone smashing and rattling against the far bulkhead.

Steven and Connie shouted in unison.

Steven and Connie reached for their buckles in unison, looked to each other in unison.

“No!” Steven shouted over the freshly-started alarm. “Stay!”

Neither could hear it over the fresh pump of adrenaline, but both understood. Steven wrestled with his buckles for a few nerve-rattling seconds before they came loose. Suddenly unprotected from the warp, Steven too was sent flying to the back of the cockpit, sending up a whole new array of alarms. He slammed into the wall with a bang, and lost orientation for a few seconds.

Connie looked around her, frustrated with the helplessness she felt in the situation. Her eyes glanced over the control console, and she had the most obvious idea.  _ Stupid Connie, _ she thought to herself.  _ Stupid, stupid! _ She hit the button to cancel the warp, which immediately mollified some of the alarms.

Steven crawled across the bulkhead towards Peridot’s gem, held more to the wall than to the floor. At first, he could only manage an army-crawl, but as he adapted to the weight of the warp, he struggled towards her gem on his hands and knees.

“No, no,” he muttered as he approached her gem. Fractures spiderwebbed across Peridot’s gem. He reached his hand out for her.

The  _ Molten Core _ lurched, bouncing Peridot off the bulkhead, further from Steven’s grasp. Connie looked out the front viewshield, kicking her leg anxiously as the left wing of the ship started to tremble noticeably. The port side creaked in staccato as her leg bounced in time, like something was closer and closer and closer to—

Snapping. Steven grabbed hold of Peridot’s gem just as the tip of the left warp-wing snapped off, sending the ship into a tumble through three-and-a-half dimensions of warped space. The starfield began to clarify, signifying the end of the warp, but the ship’s new spin had consequences for those out of their seats. Steven tucked himself in a ball around Peridot’s gem as the tumble sent him rolling up the wall and to the portside.

Connie’s stomach turned as they tumbled, but her chair miraculously kept her in the ship’s reference frame, and while the spinning starfield outside was nauseating, she was relatively stable in the ship. She winced as she looked to Steven, breaking such incredible speed with his own body. After he’d made two quick revolutions about the cockpit, she was finally able to track him with her eyes. After three, she could see where his fifth would end. She shouted a fruitless warning.

Steven’s roll terminated in the ship’s main computer, smashing it to half its original size.

“Oh no,” Connie was already muttering as Steven bounced off the computer and through Peridot’s chair. His speed was finally cut—he did one roll in mid-air, losing composition of his tight curl, and losing hold of Peridot as well.

The glint of green rose a little in the air, past Steven. Then it dropped, unsurprisingly, like a rock.

_ clack _ , Peridot landed on the ground the first time, bouncing into the air.

Steven landed on the ground with a grunt, already scrambling to catch her.

_ clack, _ she landed again.

Connie was still only out of her first seatbelt.

_ clack-clack-clackity _

Peridot’s gem made its final landing in several pieces.

“Steven!” Connie shouted. “Are you alright? Is Peridot—”

“Oh no,” she muttered to herself, as Steven crawled forward on his knees and gingerly swept the pieces together in his hands.

“Oh no,” she whispered, heart dropping into her stomach, hands going to her mouth as Steven shakily held the pieces of their friend in his hands. Steven turned to faced her.

He was crying. Silent, powerful tears.

For a second, they pooled quietly in his hands. Then, glaring light filled the bridge, a brilliant white glow coming from Peridot’s gem, from Steven’s tears, and from his tear-filled eyes. Connie squinted to see through it, but gave up on that and just closed her eyes, freeing herself from the seat with blind fumbling. She stumbled over to Steven’s side, and put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing until the light subsided.

When Connie opened her eyes, Steven was holding Peridot’s gem, whole once more. Steven shuddered, wavered, and nearly fell over. Nearly, only because Connie was there, to catch him with a yelp. She let him down to the deck gently.

“Steven!” She whispered urgently, afraid, before realizing that a whisper wasn’t how you were supposed to wake up someone who was unconscious.

“Steven!” She shouted, this time, shaking him slightly.

She pinched his cheeks, and was rewarded with nothing other than tear-wetted fingers. They tingled pleasantly and unpleasantly, all at once. Classes that she’d taken at her mother’s insistence flew back into her memory. 

“Oh, first aid, first aid…” she muttered. She checked his pulse, and his breathing, and didn’t find anything that seemed wrong to her. She did a cursory check for cuts, and found instead a few dozen likely-bruises, and a couple spots on his back that were already ugly yellow and blue. Seeing nothing really actionable on her part, she settled for resting him flat on his back to make sure he wouldn’t have any breathing problems. 

Cautiously, she picked up Peridot’s gem, and inspected it. It didn’t look like there were any cracks anymore. In fact, it looked… perfectly normal.

“How do you even give first-aid to a gem?” She grumbled quietly. She looked around the room for anything that might resemble a gem’s first-aid kit, but of course failed to find anything obvious. Instead, Connie settled for finding the best lit spot of the room, and setting Peridot there very carefully. Just in case, she roamed over to their supplies and marked out a perimeter with some spare clothing, so that nobody would accidentally step on her.

Connie stood up from her handiwork, looked around, and then wilted.

She looked out the front of the ship, and promptly regretted it—the tumble of the ship was cyclic, but they were spinning in two directions at once. A slower rotation ‘backwards,’ the front of the ship lifting up and around over and over, and a fast rotation ‘counterclockwise’ from the reference-frame of the cockpit. She was thankful, at least, that the artificial gravity meant she didn’t have to  _ feel _ the spin in addition to watching it.

Food, from Connie and Steven’s meals, was scattered across the cockpit. Smeared, in some cases. Connie’s food was mostly together, dropped around her seat, but it was still a mess.

The computer was smashed, and Peridot’s warp-seat was ruined. Connie didn’t know too much about gem technology, but they looked more like salvage than something to repair.

One part of Connie truly wanted to give up hope. Yet, she found herself possessed by a strange calm. Right now, she had a responsibility, to her teammates—her partners, her friends, even—to keep them safe, to keep calm, to support them. So even as she took in a slow breath, shuddering from the nerves of it all, she talked to herself.

“I can do this. We can do this. I can do this. We can do this. I can—”

A bang rang out in one of the rear rooms of the ship, and a new klaxxon begane to blare. Connie had to work very hard not to swear as she ran to her auxiliary control panel to try to discover the source of the problem.

“No no no no no!” She shouted as she ran for the back of the ship, leaving behind a flashing warning:

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00024 units per second and climbing. _


	2. Chapter 2

_ The Molten Core _ was an old gem cargo ship. Seeing as gems hadn’t had reason to haul much cargo around for a very long time, the operative word was “old.” Easily, it predated all of recorded human history.

The layout was fairly basic: at the front of the ship, the bridge contained all the systems for running the ship. The drive room contained all the systems which powered the ship, kept at the opposite end of the ship so that explosive errors would detonate the part furthest from the pilots. The bridge and the drive room were connected by a pair of parallel corridors that traversed the whole length of the ship—about one hundred and twenty meters—running along the outside of the vessel.

When it wasn’t loaded, that was the entirety of the  _ Molten Core _ . From the outside, it looked like two spindles with a ball clamped between them at either end, like a pair of chopsticks picking up a sphere from both ends at once. The empty space between the two rooms, though, was modular: large bays could be slotted in between, and these were usually large, brick-shaped, multi-level cargo pods.

Connie was busying herself in the closest cargo pod to the drive room. The cargo pod was far newer than the rest of the ship, so she was looking for…  

“Hull patch kit, hull patch kit, hull patch kit!” Her eyes darted across the walls until she found something that looked like a fire extinguisher, but more clinical. A teal cylinder with a thin hose tipped with an applicator. Peridot had pointed it out earlier when they had toured the ship. She snatched it off the wall and ran for the drive room.

A quick survey of the drive room concluded: it was a mess. Anything that had been loose was scattered about the cabin, but nothing was on fire. So there was that.

The drive room had three major components. Temperature control was nested in a network of girders above the room. It looked like someone had made spaghetti and meatballs out of metal and about twenty times as large, then hung it in rafters. The warp-drive motivator itself was situated on the stern end of the room, indistinguishable from something like a furnace giving birth to scrying orb. The power core was situated in the center, a small yellow crystalline heart which spread veiny tendrils all about the ship.

Connie kept as quiet as she could, listening for the pressure leak—in theory, she’d be able to detect it by listening for quiet hissing noises.

As she checked over each wall, hovering her ear as close to each of the miscellaneous systems dotting it as she dared, it was difficult not to remind herself that she could also theoretically detect a pressure leak by way of explosive decompression. She tried to use that as a motivator to move quickly.

After checking all the walls and the deck, Connie began to grow discouraged. She ran back to her copilot’s seat to check, but still: 

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00031 units per second and climbing. _

She was about to think about tackling the problem of how to check the ceiling, when a possibility occurred to her. She checked the power core itself for a leak, and heard nothing but a disconcerting throbbing noise that seemed normal, as much as gem-tech could be normal. Pressing her ear against the warp-drive, though, she heard a quiet wind-like noise inside one of the great many tubes extending from it. The tubes appeared to exit the spacecraft, connecting to devices outside.

“Is the leak outside?” Connie wondered aloud. She felt around the edges of the tube, hoping to feel a gentle hiss of air. To no avail: to her best inspection, patching the leak was beyond her grasp.  

So, now what would she do?

“It’d really help to have Peridot for this,” she realized. She  _ hoped _ Peridot would reform. Connie knew that shattering wasn’t supposed to be recoverable for gems. She couldn’t be sure she’d ever see Peridot again, technically speaking. Steven was  _ very _ magic, though, so Connie had high hopes. After all, death wasn’t supposed to be recoverable for humans, but Lars had looked very hale for a zombie.

She jogged back up to the bridge to check on her two patients—no changes other than Steven’s bruises springing into full color—then grabbed up the rest of her meal to go back to the drive room and think about the situation. As she passed the cockpit chair, she forgot to check her screen.

 

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00058 units per second and climbing. _

 

Connie examined the drive core for any air intakes, anywhere it took in air from the drive room itself. No luck, there. It seemed pretty sealed. She took her time on some ultra-flattened makeshift soft taco while she thought about the situation. She definitely didn’t want to ignore the problem, but it seemed like there was nothing she could do.

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00139 units per second and climbing. _

She put her ear to it again. Did it sound louder than before? It could be that the hull breach was widening.

That would be bad.

Connie hefted the cylinder she’d fetched and flicked the switch on it. A toxic-looking blueish gunk sprayed from the applicator, jerking Connie’s hand back with the recoil. Crossing her fingers, she carefully applied it to the seams of the leaky tube. If there was a leak into the main room, it was probably at the seam, right? She put her ear back to the tube, and listened.

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00122 units per second. _

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00110 units per second. _

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00098 units per second. _

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00184 units per second and climbing. _

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00467 units per second and climbing. _

Connie half-jumped away from the pipe before she heard a loud crunching noise rattle down it, from somewhere in its extremities.

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00596 units per second and climbing. _

Connie realized this wasn’t a problem she could fix. Not on her own. She could just cut losses. She ran to the starboard side entrance to the room, and fiddled with the door panel until it dropped shut with a slam. Now, the other side. If she could seal this room closed, Peridot would still be able to access it (in theory), but it wouldn’t empty the whole ship of atmosphere.

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00603 units per second and climbing. _

There was a creaking moan from the drive motivator, and then an explosion. Or rather, an implosion of force, followed by an explosion of sound. 

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: 137.02099 units per second.  _

_ Drive system failure. _

Connie felt rather than heard a slam before her legs were pulled out from under her. For a second or less, she found herself falling sideways, back towards the drive motivator. Then, a sonic clap sent her to the floor with ringing ears. She lay there with her heart hammering for a few dazed seconds before she processed what had happened, then rolled over to check the damage.

The room looked more or less the same, if a bit re-scattered. 

The complaint of metal buckling rang through the room, but with her ears still stinging as they were, Connie registered it a second later than she should have. She glanced up to the ceiling to see one of the girders which stored the temperature regulator had slumped, failed somewhere. Somewhere right above her, near the port-side hull.

The instant she realized, she rolled away from the wall and pulled herself forward, away from the path of the failing beam. The thing snapped, crashing to the ground with lethal force. Fortunately, Connie's reaction had come quickly enough to vacate her torso from the beam's landing point. Connie’s leg was not as lucky. Connie screamed as the corner of the beam smashed into the deck just a hair’s length short of her left thigh, pinning her against the floor. She covered her head and shut her eyes as various hundreds of pounds of equipment fell around her. A large cable from the temperature regulator knocked the wind out of her as it landed across her midsection, but the bulk of its weight had fallen elsewhere.

She grimaced as the clattering stopped, and tried to assess her situation. 

Teeth: numb. Hands: shaky. Leg: quite possibly broken. Pain: excruciating, but somehow not debilitating. Connie decided that if there were any gods, she’d have to thank the one responsible for coming up with endorphins. 

The cable wasn’t crushing her, but it was also heavy in such a way that she couldn’t get it off without rolling over to get more leverage. She couldn’t roll over, of course, because her leg was pinned down. A little bit of tugging made it clear that it was  _ very _ pinned down, and could still hurt worse after all, thank you very much.

She committed to enumerating her resources.

The hull patch kit was still in her right hand, for one. Her pockets had a couple pieces of jerky. She turned as much as she could to glance at the back of the room, re-ascertaining the lack of a gaping hole into space. That put ‘atmosphere’ on her list of assets. Her crewmates were both unconscious. 

That last one wasn’t really a resource, more of a thing she had remembered, and really wished she hadn’t. Kind of like what the pain felt like. A hazy thing that she remembered in agonizing detail from the previous second, rather than something she felt from instant to instant.

Connie bit the inside of her cheek to refocus herself.

In order to get a look at her leg, she needed to get the cable off of her. She tried her best to wiggle it forward—maybe it would roll off her if she got it far enough up? That sounded painful, but more in an uncomfortable-painful way than a painful-painful way.

She strained at that for an interminable period before the pain of wriggling with a caught leg got to be too much for her. She collapsed.

_ What a stupid way to die, _ the illogical part of her brain said.  _ Blood loss from gnawing off my own leg. _

_ We aren’t going to die because of this, _ said the logical part.  _ People have survived for weeks pinned by rocks. If anything kills us, it’ll be starvation. Or the ship. _

_ Peachy, _ said the part of her brain that had to listen to all that.

She looked back to her right side. It was pretty easy to worm the hull repair kit over to her side of the cable. She could even reach out and hold the switch with her left hand while guiding the applicator with her right. Maybe she could get out of this with the time-honored human tradition of tool-use. She carefully pressed the applicator between the cable and the ground, and squeezed the trigger. The patching gunk was fast-hardening, but not instant: she was able to build a pile of the stuff between the hull and the cable. The hull gunk piled up like toothpaste, and Connie steadily felt the weight of the cable lighten on her chest. With a bit more trepidation, she switched the applicator to her left hand to do the same thing on the other side, elevating the cable so that it no longer lay across her.

Breathing a bit easier, Connie was finally able to angle herself to see the situation around her thigh. The look of it was not promising, but not as bad as she’d begun to envision. Seeing the situation made one thing much more clear, though: the other half of the beam was still anchored in the ceiling. If that failed, it would come down and crush her other leg, too—she pulled her right leg in to prevent that. She wasn't feeling particularly comfortable with bets on the ship's structural integrity.

She strained down with the applicator, then paused. The girder was a lot heavier-looking than the cable, for one. There was also next to zero space between her leg and the beam itself. If she tried to pull the same trick, she might end up gluing her injured leg to the deck. Then she’d  _ definitely  _ have to gnaw her own leg off.

Well, probably not. But it would still be bad.

She groaned, laying face down. What she really was, was tired. She hurt, she hadn’t slept in over sixteen hours, she hurt, she was fed up with the situation, she hurt, and she was tired.

If she was going to try something drastic she’d try it after resting. For just a bit.

 

Connie eventually settled into a rhythm regarding her situation. She’d worm a bit to see if she’d made any progress getting free since last time, cry to relieve her pain and despair, then lie down and rest up for her next attempt. She desperately  _ wanted _ to sleep, but there were two things stopping her. First of all, she hurt. A lot. Second of all, she was desperately afraid that falling asleep and deadly shock response would be the same thing. The mere fear of that was enough to jerk her back to consciousness every time she started to drift off.

She wondered what the situation with the room pressure was. She wondered if maybe  _ that _ would kill her.

 

Peridot blinked. The process of reforming wasn’t one she was typically accustomed to, but after having done it three times now in just a couple years, she was starting to get uncomfortably used to it. Perhaps the probability of her poofing had a strong correlation with her number of interactions with interesting people.

She finally parsed the place she’d reformed in. The cargo ship. She glanced around and was immediately confused. She was standing in a circle of human clothings, and Steven was taking a nap on the floor. It didn’t look very comfortable. The bridge had been converted into a mess—and not in a good way, there was no order to this mess, like a proper good mess had—and her station had been completely wrecked.

Peridot started to worry when she thought about that. She became more worried when she realized that she didn’t have any memory of how she poofed, and  _ definitely _ didn’t have any memory of why the ship seemed to be on a total spinout. Even without a stomach, Peridot felt a bit dizzy at the view. She walked over to Connie’s control panel to see what the blinking alarm-light was complaining about.

_ Hull Breach, Drive Room. Pressure Loss: .00002 units per second and stable. _

That would eventually be a problem, she thought, frowning. Nothing that couldn’t wait, but not quite insubstantial. She attempted to check the ship’s autologging, but those systems were stored on the main computer, which had been totally trashed. She walked over to Steven, and nudged him to wake him up.

“Steven?” She asked. Nudge, nudge.

No response, none at all. Peridot looked at Steven properly for the first time since she reformed. Discolouration—Peridot remembered seeing Steven with that sort of wound after Jasper had captured him, before she was a Crystal Gem. He recovered fine from it, so this would be fine, right? Purple-black-green splotches were all over him, though. He was hurt. No doubt about that.

“Steven!” Nudge, nudge. 

“Steven!” She shouted.

 

“—ven!…” Connie heard, at the edge of her consciousness. Peridot?

 

How did Earth-creatures function, again? They could not be repaired easily, but could repair themselves. They required functionality in order to self repair, and functionality required…  _ Blood flow, and respiration, _ Peridot finally recalled. She checked those, and her worries were temporarily alleviated until—

 

“Peridot!” Connie screamed again, as loudly as she could. Her throat felt worn already, but if Peridot was awake, if she was okay, if she was fine, maybe Connie could be, too.

 

Peridot ran down the port corridor as fast as her short legs could carry her.

“Peridot!”

She heard her name again, desperate and ragged.

“Connie!” She shouted back.

 

Connie wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so happy to see anyone, ever.

“Peridot, oh thank—Ngah!” Connie winced as she pulled herself a bit too forward to look up towards the gem running for her side.

“Connie!” Peridot knelt down by the prone human. “What happened?”

“What does it look like?” Connie managed through grit teeth. “I’m pinned down!”

“Are you okay?  _ Will you be okay? _ ” Peridot’s voice pitched up about half an octave with each sentence.

“We have to get this—agh!—this stupid thing off my leg! Can you lift it off?” 

“Lift  _ that? _ ” Peridot dug her fingers into her hair. “I’m  _ tiny _ ! I can’t lift that!”

“It’s m-made of metal!” Connie said. “Just  _ get it off of me _ , and I can get out from under it.”

“Oh. Oh! Right!” Peridot clenched her fists. “Hold still! I’ll take care of it in a jiffy!”

Peridot held her hands out and strained, trying with all her might to lift the massive metal  beam. She screwed up her eyes, and then closed them, her hands trembling. Connie felt it start to lighten ever so slightly, when—

Peridot’s hands collapsed to her sides, and she started to gasp. A light prickle in her gem stung her thoughts—overexertion, she realized.

“Guh,” she moaned. “It’s no use! I can’t do it!”

“I’ve seen you lift cars before!” Tears started to come back to Connie’s eyes, somewhere between exasperated and desperate. “Why can’t you—”

“I don’t know!” Peridot started pacing urgently, holding her palms to her temples. “I just… I can’t! It’s too heavy!”

Connie groaned.

“I’m gonna lose my leg, and I’m gonna die, and Mom’s gonna kill me for that!”

“Humans can lose their limbs? They can  _ die twice? _ ” Peridot near-shrieked.

“Calm down!” Connie snapped. “I want a turn to panic! Gah! This is s-so stupid! Why can things fall on you in  _ space? _ Things aren't supposed to fall in space! If I bite it out here, it better not be ironic! ”

Peridot slapped herself in the forehead, and ran for the bow-side of the room.

“Peridot!” Connie called after her. “Don’t just… just leave! Try to pull it up or something!”

“I’m going to deactivate the deck gravity,” Peridot called back. “I can get it off for about thirteen seconds! Do you think we can get you out of there in time?”

Connie blinked. Without gravity? She nodded quickly, pressing back the nausea from the growing pain.

“Can you?” Peridot repeated urgently.

“I said—” Connie shook her head, realizing she hadn’t actually said anything. “I think so!”

“Just a second… okay! Gravity loss in three! Two—”

Connie’s stomach lurched as a wave of gravitic force passed through the ship. Then, the pain in her leg took a different tone: no longer did it hurt from an identifiable force, weighing down upon it, but only hurt from its own injury. The tension of her body proved plenty to fling the girder free in microgravity, but she cried out in pain as her injured leg levered it up. 

Later, Connie would realize that she was likely the first human to achieve thirteen seconds of airtime on their vomit while indoors.

Connie groped around in midair helplessly, half-blinded by the pain. She caught another girder, and both pulled herself to it and it to her. Her mind raced at a million miles an hour, but still seemed somehow two seconds behind everything that happened, tumbling over herself over and over. She tumbled over herself a couple of times before Peridot came swooping in with practiced precision.

Peridot had been trained for motion in microgravity. A niche situation for gems, but not unheard of. She managed their movement by pushing off of a piece of debris, then pushed off the wall into the corridor. They floated towards the port-side passage at a rate that would be glacial compared to walking, but it was easily fast enough to get out of the drive room before the gravity returned.

Connie flailed in panic as another wave of gravity swept through the ship, dizzying and disorienting her. Desperately, she tried to right herself—

And fell directly on top of Peridot.

The shock of falling sent a wave of pain through her leg, testing the limits of her consciousness. As she recovered, Connie began to mutter out an apology, but Peridot waved it aside.

“It was intentional,” she grunted. “I hypothesized my form would be softer than the floor, and you are injured.”

“Th-thanks.”

Connie shook her head. She could feel the static fuzz of unconsciousness creeping closer and closer, now that she was safe.

“Need to get to chair,” she warned Peridot. “Support my left side. Leg won’t take any weight.”

With a little help from Peridot, Connie managed to stand up on her right leg. Then, bracing an arm on Peridot’s shoulder and her other against the wall, she limped down the corridor. What followed was a haze of pain, but by the end of it, Connie finally felt safe to sleep.  



	3. Chapter 3

Steven’s eyes opened, and he was adrift in space. The infinite void stretched out around him to every side.

“Ah!” he shouted, and pressed his hands to his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut. There wasn’t any air in space! He had to conserve everything!

“…Ah?” Nothing had happened.

He opened his eyes and looked around. Actually, he was breathing quite freely. He looked around, moved around, and after a little experimentation found he could orient himself in whatever way he chose.

“Oh,” he realized. “I’m dreaming.”

He’d been doing a lot of that, recently. He took the time to survey his surroundings more carefully. For a while, he was in the middle of complete nowhere, but after a few minutes he noticed that one of the stars was dimmer than the rest, and blinking. With a thought, he propelled himself towards it.

The  _ Molten Core _ came into view, and it didn’t look pretty. From out here, it looked kind of like someone had shoved three bricks of different sizes into an oversized safety-pin. And then threw it in a wind-tunnel. Looking at it, Steven felt some amount of concern that the spin of the ship might fling the cargo bays—which were much like small multi-level warehouses—free from the superstructure.

What had set it to such a spin? Steven looked about, and saw a halo of debris around the ship. He remembered seeing the very tip of the port ‘spine’ snap off, the warp-wing that projected out past the front of the bridge. He remembered all that followed.

“Peridot!” he whispered, heart leaping into his throat. Was she okay? Did he heal her?

He floated into the ship and was met with a whirl of confusion. With a little tweaking, he could match his rotation to be more similar to the ship’s, but he realized quickly that unless he practiced for another hour, he wasn’t likely to get anywhere.

Would it be worth it to do that? Probably, yes. But it was frustrating, and in his frustration Steven thought of another important thing that he had to do. He needed to warn the rest of the Crystal Gems that they were stranded, and needed rescue. He looked around, and thought about home. About family, the rest of the Gems.

As he reached out to find it, an enervating chill passed through him. The longer he stretched out for it, the more tired he felt, but eventually he could feel the Earth as a dim glimmer on the horizon of his thought.

_ That’s odd, _ he thought.  _ That took a lot longer than last time. _

He looked around for it, and realized that he couldn’t distinguish its direction. All he had, was a sense of an idea of where it was. A pull towards it. He shut his eyes, and let himself float in that vague direction.

As he did, he realized with unease that this was also taking a lot longer than last time.

 

Connie entered consciousness much like a parade enters a street: not all at once, but as a long and arduous process that most bookish people such as herself would like to see happen a good deal more quickly. Connie spent a long time thinking about how awful it was to be awake before she realized she was in fact, awake. Her eyes opened readily—she wasn’t used to sleeping in bright places.

She glanced down to her leg. It didn’t look pretty, but it looked a lot better than missing. Carefully, wincing, Connie pulled herself further up the chair to examine the triage that she’d instructed Peridot through. The first and most obvious success was that the wound itself was examinable at all—she’d talked Peridot through cutting off her pant-leg with medical scissors, so that the clothing wouldn’t restrict blood-flow around the injury. The thing itself was a swollen mess of black and purple, but the swelling wasn’t too much worse than when she’d seen before passing out.

Combining the removed leg of her pants with one of Steven’s spare shirts and some scavenged metal rods from the drive room, Connie had talked Peridot through the construction of a crude splint for the leg. Somewhere during that process, she’d passed out. Looking at it now, though, it was pretty clear that Peridot hadn’t quite tied it together tight enough. It was starting to loosen.

“Peridot?” Connie croaked, looking around her. Nowhere to be seen. She twisted about to touch her hand to the wall, and tried to push the angle of chair back towards stern end, but instead found it easier to pull herself in the other direction, counterclockwise. On her way around, she spotted her terminal and leaned in a little to read it.

The hull breach seemed to have been taken care of, so that was something off her chest. She navigated through a couple of the menus looking for other problems, before leaning in a little too far and shifting something in her leg. Connie’s vision swam at the sudden pain, and she found herself laying down a few minutes to cope.

Slowly, she sat up again, moving a bit more gingerly this time. Another glance behind her—this time, she caught sight of Steven, still lying in the same spot. 

She tapped at the screen until she finally found something useful—an intercom.

She frowned as she tapped at it again.

“Hello?” Connie asked it. 

She pressed and held it, this time. Unseen speakers gave off the quiet sound of static, but refused to carry her voice. Eventually, she gave up with a groan, but a couple minutes of sitting and waiting revealed that it had done its job to at least some extent. Peridot came running at speed.

“Steven? Connie?” She surveyed the room, before displaying excellent skills of deduction. “Connie!”

“Hey, Peridot,” Connie gave a little wave.

“Are you better? Or do you require additional aid?” Peridot approached with eyes wide and concerned. 

“A little of both,” Connie said. “Mostly the second one.”

“Right! Excellent. I am… I am ready to assist!” She saluted.

“Uh, a bunch of things,” Connie said, wincing. “To start, could you get the first-aid kit and some water? I could really use some aspirin. After that, we need to take a second shot at this splint, get it on a little bit tighter.”

Peridot didn't even wait for Connie to finish speaking before moving—nervous energy tangibly drove her forward as she fetched the large water jug from where Connie had packed it in Steven’s hotdog duffle-bag, then quickly came running back with the first aid kit. Peridot made every move as quickly and precisely as she could. Repairing a human was a lot like repairing a machine, but the stakes were higher. Failing to repair a machine meant losing the machine. Failing to repair Connie meant losing a friend.

“Alright!” Peridot opened up the kit and rubbed her hands together. “Uhh… what’s an ‘aspirin?’”

“There’s a little bottle of pills in… uh, somewhere. It’s labeled.”

“Got it! What’s it do?” Peridot squinted to read the fine print of the bottle.

“It’s a pai—” Connie began, before Peridot cut back in.

“Anti-inflammatory!” The gem’s gaze swiveled back to Connie with owl-like intensity. “Are you on fire? Is that why you wanted the water? Hold on!”

“No, no! Peridot, stop,” Connie coughed a little, and grinned. “I can’t laugh right now, it’d hurt too much. I’m just thirsty. Uh, anti-inflammatory means that it stops swelling. Or makes it less bad, anyway.”

Peridot blinked. She looked down at Connie’s leg, then back to her.

“Oh. Is the swelling dangerous? It looks very swole.”

“Swollen.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“Yes and no,” Connie grimaced. “Later.”

“What purpose does the swelling serve?”

“I don’t know. Some healing response or something.”

“Then why would you want to stop it?”

“Because it hurts!” Connie snapped. “It hurts, and I hurt, a lot. And the aspirin, will help me hurt less.”

Peridot shrunk back a bit. “…Right. I understand.”

Connie sighed as Peridot wrestled the bottle open.

“Sorry, Peridot… shouldn’t get mad like that. I just—”

“I understand,” Peridot said, smiling a little. “It can be… hard, when you’re hurting, and you can’t help yourself.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Connie sniffed a bit. “Give me two, please.”

“The bottle says to take two only if—”

“Trust me on this,” Connie said. “One will do next to nothing to the pain. Two  _ might _ help a little.”

“Right.” Peridot followed an adapted mechanical maxim: when in doubt, trust the manual included with the machine (human), not the manual included with the tool (medicine).

Connie took the pills with a healthy and enthusiastic swig of water. She gasped as she closed the jug.

“Oogh. Thanks. Thanks, again.”

“Is it better?”

Connie chuckled a bit.

“It’s gonna take a while for it to kick in. I’m just…” She shifted a bit, nervously. “I was… really scared, back there. Pinned down like that. I don’t know what would have happened, if you weren’t here.”

“Well, for one, you might not be in this mess,” Peridot joked as she started on untying the makeshift splint. She paused a second, glancing up at Connie. “Is it okay if I—”

“Yeah, go ahead. We need to fasten it really, really tight. I might make some noise when you tie it, don’t worry about it.”

Peridot hesitated before getting back to work. “Roger.”

“But seriously,” Connie said, quietly. “Thanks. Don’t make light of it. This would be  _ way _ worse without you here.”

“…Wow. Thanks.” Peridot shrunk back a little with a smile.

“I only wish you got back sooner!” Connie said, giving the barest huff of laughter, before instantly regretting it. “Ow. Oof. Maybe I uh, wouldn’t have got into this mess, with you around.”

“About that,” Peridot ventured as she tied the lower of the two ties tight. It didn’t seem to bother Connie at all, but it wasn’t where she’d been hurt. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Connie said with a sigh. “I put some hull-gunk on one of the hoses of the warp drive, and everything went crazy. Think I broke it. I see you fixed the leak, though.”

“Oh! No, that’s not what I was talking about. I only needed to add a little bit to what you did,” Peridot said, perking up a bit. “I know  _ exactly _ what happened there. And actually, you saved your life, there. And probably Steven’s.”

“Huh?”

Peridot pointed out the window to the broken warp-wing.

“The warp-drive was losing pressure through there. Normally, all that pressure-loss would be coming from the drive itself, but there was a little leak in the gravy-tube to the wing, so the air of the ship was slowing the loss of drive pressure. You sealed the leak, which triggered core-collapse early…” Peridot made an uneasy face. “But that would have happened eventually anyway. And when it  _ did _ happen, it would have spaced the entire ship through that tube.”

Connie blanched a little. Suddenly, coming that close to death felt a little bit more real.

“So wait, what pulled me towards the drive if the leak was fixed?” Connie asked.

“The neutronium stack blew,” Peridot said, maneuvering around Connie’s winces as she untied the top fastening on the splint. “You got pulled by a gravity-gradient when the neutronium lost static-containment and sublimated instantly. The particle burst also shot out the warp wings, giving us a  _ lot _ of velocity in addition to our spin.”

“Oh. That’s… not good,” Connie said, clenching the arms of her chair as Peridot’s normally-nimble fingers fumbled with the knots, prodding her injured thigh occasionally.

“What I was asking was, what happened to put us  _ in _ this whole mess? The last thing I remember is my warp-chair breaking.”

“Basically… your gem smashed into the wall back there,” Connie started, nodding towards it. “It looked a lot like you were getting hurt, so Steven got out of his seat to try to grab you.”

“…No wonder he’s been out for so long,” Peridot murmured.

“Then, I took us out of warp. Something went wrong, though, and that’s what broke the warp-wing. Also broke your spot, indirectly.”

“How?”

“Uhh… by way of Steven, and a lot of inertia.”

Peridot winced.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” Connie grinned a little. “If I’d been sent around the place like that, I’d be  _ really, definitely _ dead.”

She yelped as Peridot accidentally tugged the splint tight a bit too quickly.

“Ack! Sorry!” Peridot squeaked. “Can we talk about something else? Non-death things?”

“Ow, ow ow…” Connie winced. “Yeah, sure. Just make sure to get a good knot.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before Connie spoke up again.

“So uh… what were you doing?”

“I was examining our cargo,” Peridot said. “I’ve explored most of pod one, but there’s not really anything useful in it.”

“Oh? What’s in there?”

“Pretty much nothing,” Peridot groused, tying off the knot. “It’s nearly completely empty. Which doesn’t make sense, because this thing didn’t  _ handle _ like an empty ship. It felt like we were carrying major cargo.”

“Maybe it’s just that old?” Connie wondered.

Peridot shook her head.

“Must be one of the other cargo pods,” she reasoned. “There’s got to be at least a thousand tons of  _ something _ stashed away somewhere, and basically all there is in pod one is cellulose stacks.”

Connie perked up a little.

“Cellulose?”

“Huh? Yeah, why?”

“I mean, depending on how dense it is, and how much there is… it  _ might _ be edible? Not nutritious, obviously, but it might be worth some calories…”

Peridot’s face went blank as the realization loomed over her.

“We’re going to run out of food,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Connie nodded, yawning. The pain was tooth-numbing, but being hurt was exhausting. “Anything we can do to stretch it out would be nice, but I mean, if we’re really lost in space all we can do is wait it out for help, right?”

“You only brought ten of those meals!” Peridot said, squeaking a little. “Three meals a day, two humans, means two days!”

“Calm down, calm down,” Connie said, holding up her hand. “First of all, I brought twelve. Second of all, they’re pretty high-calorie. Two a day is fine. If we want to start rationing immediately, we could live off one a day.”

“That’s still only six days!” Peridot worked at her temple with one hand and bit on the fingers of her other hand. “That’s not much better! It could take  _ months _ for us to be found! Or years!”

“ _ Second _ of all,” Connie continued firmly, “Food is the least of our problems. Humans can actually go pretty long without eating, we store up energy in fat reserves. The number I usually hear is three weeks, three weeks without food is supposed to be liveable. So let’s say we have four weeks before starvation becomes what kills us. If that’s the case, we’ve got two much more immediate issues.”

“You’re saying that being doomed to imminent  _ death _ isn’t the worst problem you have?”

“Humans need food, water, shelter. In space, let’s call that food, water, and oxygen. Three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without oxygen—” Connie paused. The pain was making her ramble on. “Well, probably a bit less on that last one. And maybe a bit more on the first two. But it’s easy to remember. We don’t have enough water for four weeks. Not sure about oxygen either, but I doubt gem ships produce their own. So that’s a priority.”

“Oh.” Peridot sat back on her knees, dejected. “So, you’re doomed to two  _ more _ imminent deaths.”

“I mean, I guess.” Connie let her head fall back against the seat. “I’m not just gonna give up, though. And I mean, I know you’ll help. And Steven, too. I trust you guys, and I’ll do everything I can, too.”

“Well, you and Steven rescued me, and you rescued Steven and yourself…” Peridot sighed, looking up and giving a forced grin. “Guess it’s my turn to rescue somebody, huh?”

Connie gave her a limp thumbs up.

“Go… go for it. I believe in you. I gotta take a nap…”

“Sleep tight,” Peridot said, her mind in grim places. She stood back up to watch Connie as she dropped near instantly back into sleep. Connie’s forehead was damp, Peridot noticed. She didn’t know much about human biology, but that didn’t seem good.

 

Steven struggled and groped in the direction of home. It still seemed… so far.

He opened his eyes and looked behind him. In the distance, he could still see the dim blink of the  _ Molten Core. _

That didn’t seem good.


	4. Chapter 4

**_About 75 hours ago…_ **

After about a few minutes of cautious prodding and experimentation, it was determined that the Homeworld canister which had noisily impacted Beach City’s eponymous beach was not, in fact, dangerous.

“So… we gonna open it?” Bismuth was the first to voice the matter. The other gems and humans collected their on the beach—Connie, Garnet, Lars, Pearl, and Steven—reacted with various degrees of enthusiasm. Pearl, Peridot, and Lars demonstrated skepticism. Garnet was as unreadable as ever. Connie showed caution, though, perhaps not as much. She turned to Steven to see his response, which was of course—

“Yup!” Cheerful as ever.

Pearl looked to Garnet with concern.

Garnet responded with her ever-dreaded shrug of tacit approval.

Pearl visibly suppressed her groaning, and looked on helplessly as Steven pressed the button that popped open the two-foot high blue cylinder. Immediately, a holographic screen bearing Blue Diamond’s distinctive features sprung into being.

“Hello?” She called, tapping at the screen.

“Hi!” Steven responded with his best diplomacy-face. He’d been practicing that one: it was just like a normal face, except you smiled more with your lips, and less with your teeth.

“Hello?” Blue asked again, as if she couldn’t hear him.

“You’re recording, My Diamond,” the soft whisper of Blue Pearl came through off screen.

“Oh, swell,” Bismuth grumbled, crossing her arms and sitting down to watch. “At least that means I can back-talk her.”

Connie snickered a little as she joined the group clustering in front of the screen. Peridot, Bismuth and Connie sat together on Steven’s right, while Pearl, Garnet, and Lars hovered over Steven’s left. It was difficult to miss the nervous energy the three of them gave off, like parents getting ready to yank their child from a ball-pit that could suddenly become full of sharks.

“Ah, dear. Oh me, will sh—will he see all of this? Can we start over?”

“You do have a 5040 appointment, My Diamond. Shall I strike that one, too?”

“Which one is that?”

“The augury, My Diamond.”

“No, no. I shan’t be missing from that. Well,” Blue Diamond glanced up to the screen nervously. “We’re off to a swimming start aren’t we, ah, Sssteven?” She fumbled over the name like it was strange in her mouth, but at least she was trying.

“She’s like a… weird alien grandma,” Connie muttered. “In the bad ways.”

“What’s a grandma?” Peridot asked under her breath.

“I dunno, but context says old and slow,” Bismuth said.

“You’ve gotten me… thinking,” Blue Diamond said, rubbing her hand against her brow. She looked tired, but in a different way than she’d seemed before. Not weary of sorrow, but weary of business. 

“It was so  _ devastating _ to my… my absolute  _ functionality _ as a Diamond to be so distraught. That’s something I already knew, though. I’ve had a lot of business to catch up on, and I’ve been watching the backlog pile up for aeons. Like a bubble, ready to burst. Yes? That seems like, like how you’d say that.” She glanced off the screen.

“Can’t we see about getting… Steven a, a live connection of some kind? This is awkward to record. It feels…” Blue Diamond shuddered. “Terribly  _ personal. _ ”

“Of course, My Diamond. I’ll see it done.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” Bismuth muttered just louder than under her breath.

“Can it from the peanut gallery,” Lars hissed. “I want to hear this!”

“What’s a pean—”

“He means we need to zip it!” Connie said, nudging Peridot.

“Zip what?”

“Our mouths, green-bean!” Bismuth whispered.

Steven tried not to let anybody notice his little chuckle as he glanced over his right shoulder.

“But what, ah, what  _ you _ showed me, and showed Yellow and even White, was that repairing our emotions, as it were, was not done by repairing our functionalities. Rather, it… it came the other way around. The standards we’d set ourselves to, to try to, to forget all the  _ mess _ with Pink, those kept the hurt fresh. It made it worse, even. And so I began to wonder, if perhaps, the standards I’ve set for  _ my _ gems are hurting them, the same way I was hurting.”

Steven both nodded silently.

“The time, My Diamond,” Blue Pearl’s voice urged gently.

“To that end!” Blue Diamond’s voice sharpened, refocused. “I have many agents, whose job it is to survey the empire. I have left their reports… unattended, for some while. But I’ve uncovered many troubling things on reviewing them.”

Her brow creased, and her next words were fraught with uncertainty and discomfort.

“I have the… distinct concern that many of our gems are… concerned for their safety. Or lacking in happiness, perhaps.”

“No, really?” Lars snarked.

“Can it!” Connie snapped back, at the same time that Pearl jabbed at him with her elbow. Lars gave a yipe of apology, and Steven waved his hand behind him in a way that said “It’s okay,” “I forgive you,” and “Please be quiet,” all at the same time. It was a talent of expression perhaps unique to Steven.

“For instance, I encountered… this specimen.” Blue said the words with particular distaste, and then looked off to her Pearl. “Is he seeing it?” 

“The graphic is displaying, My Diamond.”

True to her words, the image of a gem popped into view, picture-in-picture. She looked like Aquamarine, with the same round face and squat body, but she seemed slightly taller and slightly burlier at once. Wingless, she stood at strict attention, wearing a vest and jacket rather than the dress of the Aquamarine that they’d met before.

“This,” Blue Diamond said, the displeasure returning to her voice, “Is Maxixe Facet-1E10D Cut-2CP. She was charged with reviewing many of the outer colonies for adherence to the general codes and regulations of the Empire—a relatively undesirable position, for which she was well-rewarded. However, I grew suspicious of several tendencies of her reports: in particular, that her list of titles and credentials grew mightier every time she cited a colony for significant violations. I had a trusted lieutenant review her performance, and it became immediately clear that she was part of a conspiracy to suppress the success of newer gem elites.”

“Those poor upper-crusts,” Bismuth said, shaking her head sardonically. “How tragic.”

“Keeping the old elite in power,” Pearl reminded Bismuth quietly.

“Slag melting slag,” Bismuth retorted.

“Perhaps worse,” Blue noted, her nose wrinkling in disgust, “This Maxixe has clearly been shattering lesser gems to cover up this conspiracy. A disgraceful waste.”

“Angry at the right thing, for the wrong reasons,” Bismuth muttered, her leg bouncing in increasing agitation. 

“I’ve yet to determine her fate,” Blue said grimly, “But it calls into question the entirety of her reports. She specialized in reviewing our most fringe colonies, far removed from the rest of the Empire—it will take ages to retrace her steps. One report in particular, though, stood out to me as… in your realm of consideration. And frankly, if you could manage it, it would be a favor of no small meaning.

“A colony on the edge of  _ our _ space… but also, on the edge of your much smaller space, within your own galaxy,” Blue said. The picture-in-picture changed: now, it showed a small, earth-like body, orbiting a gas giant. The blue of oceans mingled with a purple-brown color of what might be alien foliage. “Maxixe’s report is curt and… confusing. She says, to quote:

“‘System 30-4064-225 displays atypically advance construction for a colony of its age. All functions appear to be in order, and colony is progressing ahead of schedule. The governing Hessonite is very enthusiastic in regard to her penal system—I worry, to the degree of cruelty—but she acts within ordinance.’ Ah, and here, the report ends.”

Blue Diamond looked up from whatever system she was reading the report from.

“Steven, this… this talk of ‘cruelty,’ it’s… unusual. It is likely, I suppose, that this was merely some colony that Maxixe was supposed to commit character assassination on, but could find no particulars. That she found no error, and yet was unwilling to find a lie compelling more action is… peculiar. Yet, it is less unsettling than the possibility that she was being  _ honest _ on this matter. It bothers me, and frankly, I worry I cannot trust anyone other than a Diamond—no, anyone other than myself with evaluating such a situation.”

She smiled.

“Or, perhaps I could trust, ah, a Steven on this matter. You seem… a very good judge of such issues. I—”

“Time, My Diamond.”

“I’m wrapping up,” Blue snapped back. “The augury can wait twelve seconds!”

“I leave it to you if you’d like to… review this issue. Using whatever methods you like, of course,” she noted, tapping at something off-camera. “I’ll have this message sent to you with some details regarding the system, and an official yet vague authorization of your inspection, with my credentials. I recommend you opt for ah, a discrete approach. News from Homeworld rarely reaches so far so quickly, so, I would not count on strong understanding if you approached in Pink’s old vessel. Yes. I uh, I believe that is all. Um. I hope all is well for you—”

“My Diamond.”

“Yes, yes,” she sighed. “I’ll be sending a communicator later. Do check in? Especially if you find something.” She waved at the screen, and on queue, it snapped shut. The capsule hissed, and the top popped off, revealing the rest of the cylinder hollow.

Steven glanced inside, and fished out a small tablet-like device.

“You think this is the data?” he asked, turning around.

“It is,” Garnet confirmed. 

“Huh,” Connie mused. “I didn’t figure the Diamonds were quest-givers.”

“What?” Bismuth’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s right up their alley! It’s practically their  _ whole _ alley. ‘Go there, do this, do a little dance, now go home,’ it’s all they do!”

“Why would the Diamonds tell someone to dance?” Peridot asked, tilting her head.

“If they wanted them to dance,” Pearl answered, voice well-worn. Peridot flushed, but Pearl smiled reassuringly as if to say, ‘no harm done.’

“So… are we going?” Steven asked. “I don’t think anyone should go who doesn’t want to, and I don’t think we should go at all unless enough people are going for it to be safe.”

“I’d go,” Connie said. “It seems easy enough, I don’t think we’d be doing any harm, and it seems like a cheap way to get a favor from Blue Diamond.”

“I don’t like the idea of going out and doing the Diamonds’ chores,” Bismuth rumbled, bouncing her leg again. The agitated motion seemed almost out of place on her massive frame.

“Heck no! I’m with Bismuth,” Lars said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen what the Diamonds have done. They can clean up their own mess.”

Pearl watched Garnet carefully for her analysis, and seeing none, went forward on her own.

“I’d go.  _ If _ we had a plan. I don’t know if two humans and a Pearl can convincingly represent an ‘inspection.’ But it’s too good a deal to just pass up.”

“So that’s three,” Steven said, implicitly counting himself as he tallied on his fingers. “I bet Amethyst would go, too.”

“She probably would,” Pearl said, smiling. “But we’d still have the same problem.”

“Guh,” Peridot groaned. “I’ll go. I can perform some kind of… Kindergarten inspection.”

“A Peridot, with a Pearl? Who’d believe that?” Pearl teased, grinning.

“Gah! I said that once! Once, I tell you, I’m a changed—”

“Woah, woah, woah, wait a second! It sounds like there’s a story, between you, there!” Bismuth cut in with a grin over Peridot’s embarrassed squawking. “I gotta hear this.”

“You’ll have to see if Peridot lets you,” Pearl said, laughing modestly. Then, she took on a more serious tone. “But, this is Homeworld we’re talking about. It’s a valid concern.”

“Hrm…” Bismuth huffed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll go.”

“What? I thought you were with me on this!” Lars said. “Team Homeworld Can Fix Themselves? Team Homeworld is Garbage?”

“I’m with you there, cotton-top,” Bismuth said, frowning. “But I never said I wasn’t gonna go. I just don’t  _ like _ that I’m gonna go.”

“If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go,” Steven reassured. “We’ll be fine without you.”

“No, kid. I  _ do _ want to go,” Bismuth said. “That’s what I don’t like. I’d  _ love _ to just screw it to Homeworld every chance I could, but the problem is, there are still gems suffering out there. And we can’t exactly wage a war to stop it, yeah? Not in this position. Working with the Diamonds…”

She made a gagging expression.

“I don’t like it, but it’s the best we can do. Short-stuff here couldn’t pull off an inspector’s role, but  _ I _ could. And a Bismuth is just ranking enough that you might expect a particularly well-favored one—like a Bismuth who was sent directly to inspect a colony by a Diamond—to maybe have a Pearl and some guards.”

“Sounds good enough to me,” Pearl said. “We still need to hammer out the details, but it can work. What about Connie and Steven?”

“Connie, Steven, and Peridot can run the getaway,” Bismuth said. “You, Amethyst and I can afford to be a bit more aggressive in our investigation if we know that we can blast off the second we get onboard.”

“Assuming Amethyst wants to come,” Steven said, cutting in.

“Pretty safe assumption,” Connie said, grinning. 

“We don’t know!” Steven defended.

“Ugh,” Lars groaned. “Am I the only who thinks this is a bad idea? We don’t know what we’re getting into, here! Like… like what if that Maxixe or whatever, what if she wasn’t even lying? What then, huh?”

“Then we’d definitely have to go,” Bismuth said, her expression darkening. “You heard the tyrant. That two-faced, loveless, scum-hole piece of Maxixe was shattering gems for  _ convenience. _ If a monster like that’s calling something cruel, it’s not something we can just let go. You dig?”

Lars looked taken aback for a second. He frowned, and then he frowned a little more, and then he looked up. A small ring of people looked to him for a response.

“Ngah, fine!” he turned on his heels dramatically. “I’ll talk to my crew about it. But  _ I’m _ not going if  _ they’re _ not going.”

“Lars, you don’t have to if—” Steven tried to call back to him.

“I don’t have time for your goody-two-shoesery, Steven!” Lars shouted back. “I’m going, and you can’t stop me!”

Connie snickered.

“I thought he wasn’t going unless his crew wanted to,” Steven said, looking over to her in genuine confusion.

“I think he wants to come,” Connie explained, “But doesn’t want to admit that we changed his mind.”

“Oh. That makes sense. I’m gonna go find Amethyst!” Steven took off. The rest of the gems, save for Garnet and Peridot, started filtering off after him, discussing strategy and what they might find.

“That’s weird,” Peridot muttered. “Humans are weird.”

“Really? That seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d do,” Connie poked back at her.

“You’d be mistaken,” Peridot asserted, putting her hands on her hips proudly. “We gems are above such illogic.”

“Yah-huh,” Connie said. “I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m gonna go listen in to their planning. You coming?”

“Yeah, sure. Gimme a sec.” Peridot took a deep breath as she watched Connie walk up the beach.

“So uh,” she said, awkwardly, looking to Garnet. “You haven’t said anything in a while.”

“Nope,” Garnet said, popping the ‘p.’ She hardly moved.

“You uh… you okay? Why so quiet?”

Garnet looked to Peridot discerningly, then smiled.

“I can tell you,” she said, “But you’d have to keep a secret.”

“I can keep a secret!” Peridot swore. “Any secret at all! By my honor as a Crystal Gem!”

Garnet laughed.

“I was curious,” she admitted. “I’ve been watching Steven grow as a leader for so long… I just wondered what would happen if I did nothing.”

“Oh? Are you getting tired of your position?” Peridot put her hand on her chin. “Is Leader of the Crystal Gems up for grabs?”

“Not for some time,” Garnet said, smiling warmly. “But it was still a comforting thing to see.”

“Oh. Oh! You want Steven to lead!” Peridot concluded. “I thought he was already our auxiliary-leader.”

“The Crystal Gems don’t have a proper leader,” Garnet corrected, smiling. “I’m not sure if we need one. Or if we should have one. But I’ve tried it before.”

“Well… as one  _ leader _ to another potential  _ leader, _ ” Peridot said, leaning in. “Care to share any tips? What would  _ you _ have done?”

“Nothing, probably.” Garnet looked out to the horizon. “Steven’s position with the Diamonds is stable even if he doesn’t go follow up on Blue’s favor. We don’t know we’ll get anything in return, we’ve been enemies with her in the past, and frankly, I’d rather just focus on things at home. Relax. Rebuild. There’s a lot of unfinished business on Earth. A lot of unfinished leisure, too.”

“Oh. So did Steven… ‘fail’ your ‘test?’”

“Nope.”

“You going?”

“Yep.”

“…Not feeling talkative?”

“There’s a very nice sunset in about four minutes,” Garnet said. “I’m mostly waiting for that.”

**_Present._ **

Peridot ripped a useful-looking piece of scrap out of the main computer with a snarl. She wished that she’d stuck around for that sunset.


	5. Chapter 5

There were many questions that Peridot wanted answers to, but couldn't get answers to. Questions that even the scrapped computer might not have been able to answer. For instance, what was the original oxygenation of the ship? How rapidly did one human and one half-human consume that oxygen? At what concentration of oxygen would they become incapable of sustaining themselves? Was the oxygen homogeneously distributed?

Failing to know even one of those factors drastically changed Peridot’s framing of the most proximal crisis. Since this world was awful, and nothing was right, and everything was bad, Peridot knew  _ none _ of them. There was only one advantage to the situation: Peridot knew exactly what she had to do. She needed to find a way to create oxygen in the ship. Everything she didn’t know only mattered in that she had no clue how long she had before not doing it would result in her friends dying. 

Which was incredibly stressful, but Connie had a point. It was better than not being able to do anything. Rhythmically, Peridot hit the back of her head against a bulkhead, thinking. How did humans get their oxygen normally?

“The air, you clod,” She chastised herself. The real question was where human  _ air _ got its oxygen. Plants. Could she grow a garden? Here, on the  _ Molten Core _ ? That could potentially solve the food problem at the same time!

Except for two issues. First, it required water, which was still an unsolved problem. And if it  _ did _ get solved, Connie and Steven would need the water more than the plants would. Second, it required soil and seeds. Things which Peridot simply didn’t have. So, that was a bust.

Peridot looked over to Connie. A pale color was taking root in her cheeks. Peridot realized with grim suddenness that she didn’t know what human anoxia actually  _ looked _ like. Connie could just be changing hue because of her injury, but her human body could be failing this very instant, and Peridot would have no warning before she stopped breathing. Peridot sprinted down to the drive room, driven by that fear. The ship was already next to scrap—she could afford to take a few risks with it, if it meant taking a few less risks with her friends.

Peridot found herself struggling through the guts of the ship’s temperature-control system. The first, most noticeable problem, was the fact that her ordinary mode of transport—floating on whatever metal object she could find at hand—was simply not working. Her metal powers in general, were not working. Even trying at lifting a loose piece of foil from one of Connie’s meals sent it only a half-foot off the ground before a prickle of overexertion in her gem forced Peridot to let it drift sullenly to the ground.

Which meant that Peridot had to waste valuable time clambering up drooping tubes and wires to switch between modifying parts which had fallen to the ground, and parts still appropriately suspended in the system of rafters above the room.

Peridot’s plan was relatively simple: the temperature control system was, at heart, a ventilation system. Certainly, it was more sophisticated than any human equivalent—the lack of any useful medium outdoors made the process of adjusting temperatures much more difficult. But if she could hook oxygenation into the the temperature regulation system, then it would be like hooking it into the whole ship.

And fortunately, there was already a system that did something similar in the ship. A de-carbonizer: it’s main purpose was to pull loose carbon out of the air so that it wouldn’t damage computer systems, but Peridot figured that if she overpowered it by enough… Carbon dioxide just needed an atom of carbon ripped off it to serve the same purpose as plain old oxygen. 

Peridot continued clambering between the pipes, becoming increasingly frustrated with how it seemed harder and harder for her to get up to the rafters each time.

 

Steven woke up, for real this time. He wasn’t sure if he’d given up on projecting himself to home, or if he’d tired out from trying. Quickly, he regained his bearings, looking around. Connie, close to consciousness already, stirred at Steven’s movement.

“Hey, Stevenn…” she slurred. “Good t’see you up.”

“Connie!” he exclaimed. Steven staggered a bit getting up—his everything hurt, just a little bit, but it was manageable—before running over to her.

“What happened?” he asked, checking her leg. It was swollen, and colorful in all sorts of ways that legs shouldn’t be. “Where’s Peridot?”

“Goh’ hurt fixing something in the drive room,” Connie said, yawning. “Peridot’s off doing… something.”

“She’s okay?” Steven felt a wave of relief wash over him. “I thought she… I thought—”

“Sh’was,” Connie said quietly. “But you fixed her.”

Steven sniffled a little bit.

“Guess that’s two friends I’ve brought back to life,” he joked as he wiped at one of his eyes. “Don’t want to make a habit of that.”

Connie shook her head with a little chuckle, then groaned in pain.

“Here, let me heal you, and then I’ll go check on Peridot.” Steven licked his hand and held it over injury. “You ready?”

Connie peeked at it with one eye, gritting her teeth in preparation.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she confirmed.

Steven pressed his hand down slowly but firmly on the wound. Connie flinched and shut her eyes, suffering through the fiery pain for one second, then three seconds, before squinting to assess the situation. Slowly but surely, her pain was lessening, but Steven looked down on her leg with growing concern.

“That’s weird,” he muttered. “Should be… fixed by now…”

He felt his energy being sapped up by the wound, his body tiring.

“Steven, stop,” Connie managed.

Steven lifted his hand immediately.

“What is it?” He asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Are  _ you _ okay?” Connie asked. She felt energized, awake, but Steven… “You look like you just got put through a clothes-dryer.” 

“I pretty much did,” he joked, gesturing to the room around them. “Felt like it.”

“But you  _ didn’t _ look that bad before you started. I think maybe… maybe you’re out of energy?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s like Peridot said. My power level is… basically unfair.”

“You got hurt really bad,” Connie said, quietly. “Technically, maintaining a form with mass while moving faster than light should be  _ impossible. _ Thinking about it, it’s actually weird you’re even alive.”

“Last time this happened, I was fine. I only hurt for a while afterward.”

“Did you heal a shattered gem right afterwards last time?” Connie asked pointedly. “We don’t know how much energy that would take.”

“Peridot might…” Steven suggested, but Connie made an ugly face at that.

“You haven’t told her yet?” he whispered, shocked.

“Didn’t want to worry her,” Connie said. “She was worried enough about me already.”

“She deserves to know.”

“She does,” Connie agreed, nodding guiltily. “I wasn’t in the best state to tell her, though… but did I make my point?”

“Okay, yeah, I guess. But just because I’m tired, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t heal you!”

“We don’t know if we won’t need your healing for something else,” Connie said. “And you’ve already done enough for my leg, it feels a lot better already. You need to conserve your strength, and you can finish the job when you’re feeling energized again.”

Steven thought for a little bit, then pouted.

“Did I say something wrong?” Connie asked.

“No,” Steven sighed. “I just don’t like that you’re right.”

Connie smiled, and with a grunt, she sat up to pat Steven’s arm.

“Don’t worry, Steven. We’ll get out of this.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling back. He leaned forward, and put his forehead against hers. Connie hugged him a little as he approached.

“We’ll figure it out,” he agreed.

He helped Connie get a little cup of water, before heading down to the drive room to check with Peridot.

 

“Peridot?” Steven peeked into the drive room. There was silence for a second or so before the gem in question replied.

“Steven!” Peridot’s voice sounded like it came from the other end of two tin cans on a string. Steven looked around cautiously—she was nowhere to be seen. The drive room looked like it’d recently experienced three hurricanes in rapid succession, with cables and ventilation tubing strewn about the place willy-nilly, and various boxes torn open to expose alien circuitry.

“Where are you?” Steven asked. Another good second and a half or so before there was a response.

“I’m up here!” Steven looked up, and saw Peridot excitedly waving down at him from the rafters.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t look up. Here, let me join you!” Steven bounced up to the rafters with relative ease—less ease than normal, maybe, but floating and strength were among the least burdensome of his powers. Peridot clambered over to hug him as he settled into a good spot, squeezing as tightly as she could.

Steven barely felt a thing. If he couldn’t  _ see _ her, he’d barely notice she was there. He hugged her back anyway, though. It was good to see her safe.

“So uh, what’re you up to?” he asked.

Peridot started to reply to him. Steven watched as Peridot’s mouth moved for about a whole second before he started to hear the words she’d said, distorted and tinny like a bad phone connection.

“I’m  _ trying _ to rig an oxygen-conversion system into the ship, but for some reason I’m having a lot of trouble with these last few connections.”

“Uhhh… Peridot?” Steven said, with a touch of concern. “You’re lagging.”

“———Lagging?” Peridot asked.

“Like, your voice. I’m not hearing you until  _ after _ you talk.”

Peridot paused, then threw up her arms in frustration.

“———What? It should be weeks before I have to deal with this!”

“This is normal?” Steven asked, following Peridot as she moved to a box she’d been working on.

“———No,” Peridot groused. “No, it’s not  _ normal. _ It’s what happens when gems are running on ultra-low power, though. The ‘lag’ will get worse until I get a chance to rest.”

She fumbled with trying to push two plugs together, but she couldn’t shove them together at all.

“Here.” Steven reached over and slid them together with a clean and easy click. “Just tell me what you need me to do, and I’ll do it for you.”

“———Uugh. Thanks, Steven.”

Peridot guided him through attaching a jury-rigged machine to the ventilation system, clinging to his back has he took them up and down between levels. Within a few minutes, the ventilation system was cycling a bit more air than usual, and the smell of pencil-lead began to waft out of the machine.

“—This is so frustrating!” Peridot complained as she rode Steven’s back down to the cockpit. “—Could have sworn I had more energy than a single new form and half an hour of work.”

“I’ve been low on power, too,” Steven said, nodding.

“—Maybe we passed through some kind of… negative energy field,” Peridot proposed.

“Maybe,” Steven said, nodding. “I think there’s another reason, though. Your gem got hurt when your seat malfunctioned, and I had to heal you.”

“—Hrm. Yeah,  _ could _ be why. When a gem is cracked, they can lose a lot of their ability to store energy. But that should have just affected me, then.” 

Steven nodded a bit solemnly.

Peridot felt a cloud of nervous energy settle between them.

“—Steven?”

“Yeah?” Steven looked back and smiled weakly at her.

“—Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Um… yeah? Kind of.”

“—What is it?”

“Probably nothing! It’s probably fine! You seem fine!”

“—How badly was I hurt?” Peridot squeaked.

“Youmighthavebeenshattered!” Steven blurted out.

 

“WHA———AAA—AAAAA——T?”

Connie sat up straight at the sound of what seemed to be the most frightened and most confused robot in existence.

 

Steven stood next to Connie while Peridot paced, muttering.

“Alright! I’ve figured it out!” Peridot decided, turning back to the other two. “You two must have mis-observed the situation!”

The two shook their heads in negation.

“Gah! No! You’re supposed to agree with me!”

Steven and Connie looked to each other with grimaces.

“…We’re  _ pretty _ sure of what happened,” Connie said.

“But… but that’s impossible!” Peridot threw up her hands and started pacing again.

“I knew you probably wouldn’t like to hear you’d been shattered,” Steven ventured, “But I didn’t realize it would make you so—”

“Absolutely befuddled? Panicked? Shook?” Peridot interjected.

“Angry,” Connie clarified. 

“I’m having an existential crisis!” Peridot rebutted.

“An angry one,” Steven muttered.

“B—ecause  _ healing  _ a shattered gem is  _ literally impossible! _ When a gem shatters, there’s ——extradimensional space that’s — _ lost forever! _ ” Peridot dug her fingers into her hair. “It’s like saying that you can heal a vacuum from being empty! Or, no, no. It’s —like saying you can heal  _ space _ from having  _ gravity _ through it! You just… you can’t!”

Connie and Steven looked to each other again.

“If you  _ did _ ,” Connie figured, “How hard would it be?”

“——You. —Ca—n’t!” Peridot’s lag flared up whenever she got upset.

“Anything that can be created in the first place can be recreated, though, right?” Connie said, putting her hand on her chin. “How much energy does it take to make that space in the first place?”

“You  _ don’t _ make it,” Peridot grumbled. “Gems… ‘discover’ the extradimensional portions of themselves while they’re in the ground. That’s why it takes so long. If you were to  _ make _ that material, from scratch, you’d best measure the energy cost in seconds of starlight.”

Steven grinned a little. “Well, according to  _ someone _ , Starlight might as well be my name. So maybe it really is just as simple as me healing you.”

“By starlight, I mean the light of an  _ entire _ star,” Peridot clarified, rubbing her head. “About forty seconds of it, for a star like Earth’s.”

Connie and Steven stared dumbly at Peridot for a little bit. They both knew that it was a lot of power. Connie, in particular, had been curious about Dyson Spheres before. 

“Well,” Steven figured. “That’d definitely tire me out.”

Peridot snorted, and shook her head.

“You just casually walk around in unmitigated warp,” she said, “So sure. Whatever. Maybe that’s just what it takes to make Steven tired.”

“I hope that’s all it is,” Steven said, with a little smile. “Because I’m really glad you’re still with us.”

Peridot blushed a little. Connie grinned.

“You sap,” Connie muttered, nudging Steven. “Go give her a hug from me.”

“Aye-aye, Vice-Captain,” Steven said with a salute.

“You guys are ridiculous,” Peridot said, shaking her head with a hidden smile and walking cross the room to meet them. Peridot felt more solid for it. More real.


	6. Chapter 6

“Alright, Peridot,” Connie said as she hobbled back into the cockpit, bracing her injured side against Steven. She couldn’t get around on her own, but the splint was firm enough that she could travel with help. “I’m going to have to report to you that Lift Tubes 1 and 2 of the first cargo pod is off-limits.”

Peridot roused from her state of dormancy fairly quickly. She’d taken Steven’s chair as her resting spot, for now.

“Muh?”

“Steven and I claimed them as outhouses, then we sealed them up on the lower decks.”

“Outhouse? What’s an ‘outhouse?’ Why would you have to seal it off from the rest of ship?”

“If we didn’t,” Steven joked, “The bottom floor would have to be called the poop deck.”

“Eww,” Connie said with a giggle. Peridot blanched as she realized what they meant.

“Eww,” she agreed. “I could have gone not knowing that.”

“I think you’re happier being told about it, than you’d be discovering it,” Connie said as Steven helped her back into her seat.

“I suppose,” Peridot muttered, closing her eyes again. Steven stretched his arms and yawned. He looked around, a little awkwardly.

“So uh… How long have we been lost?” he asked.

Connie pushed her chair around to her terminal, and navigated around a bit. With a little effort, she found what she was looking for.

“Looks like the auxiliary computer booted a little less than ten hours ago,” she reported. “Wow. That feels like… both too much time, and too little time.”

Steven frowned.

“I was trying for most of that time to contact the Gems, but didn’t get anywhere. It was too far, and I was too tired.”

“I think I spent five or six hours of that trapped under a chunk of metal,” Connie groused. “We haven’t actually made that much progress towards getting out of this mess, and we’re on a bit of a clock.”

“Oxygen shouldn’t be a problem,” Peridot chipped in. “The re-oxygenator I rigged up supplies more than enough oxygen for both of you, easily. Well, if it works.”

“So, that gives us four or five days, then water becomes an issue,” Connie figured, tallying on her fingers. “And we still need to find a way to get help.”

“I mean, all I should have to do is rest up, right?” Steven figured. “Then I can call for help, and we’ll just have to wait however long it takes the _Sun Incinerator_ to get here.”

“Yeah. Yeah! That’s doable!” Connie pounded a fist into her hand. “We’re gonna be fine.”

Peridot’s brow furrowed, and she sat up. She’d been thinking on the matter for a while.

“Actually,” she said. “I think we’re in trouble.”

“Huh?” Connie turned to Peridot. “Why’s that?”

“Does telling them we need help tell them where we _are?_ ” Peridot asked.

Connie thought about it.

“It could,” she said. “We could have Steven memorize our coordinates, or—”

“Navigation,” Peridot said, jerking her thumb at the central console, “Is scrap.”

Connie frowned.

“Well, you know roughly where we are, right?”

“Roughly? Yes. _Very_ roughly. I remember what are coordinates were before we made the last warp, and I can _estimate_ our current position, based off that.”

“So, we give them the estimate.”

“My best estimate,” Peridot said, her brow creasing, “Has a significant margin of error. Consider this: we entered a tumble either just before or just after dropping out of superluminal velocity, so we could be basically anywhere in a cone originating from our last known location. I’ve been trying to estimate that cone, and it’s… big.”

“How big?” Connie asked.

“Light-years across!” Peridot held her arms out for emphasis. “The _Sun Incinerator_ ’s sensor suite is impressive for a ship of its size, but we aren’t emitting or reflecting significant energy right now, and it can’t run scans while superluminal…” Peridot rubbed her temples nervously.

“When you factor in the size of the area we might be in, it could take them a while to find us even if we can tell them where we are.”

“That’s fine,” Steven said. “We can wait, right?”

“I mean, that depends on how long ‘a while’ is,” said Connie. “But as long as we’re smart, and don’t waste anything, we can probably sit it out.”

“‘A while’ could be anywhere from a few hours to a whole year,” Peridot said bitterly. “They might luck out and find us early, but… I’d say that eighty days of searching is the most reasonable estimate of how long it should take them to find us.”

Connie closed her eyes and leaned her head back as she thought about Peridot’s scenario.

“Well,” Steven said, “We might get lucky, right? Or maybe I can guide them once they’re close enough, with my dream powers.”

“Maybe,” Peridot said. “But superluminal, no, _instantaneous_ information transfer is… energy-expensive. To say the least. Of the powers at your disposal, your casual use of it was startling to me. Remember the Diamond Line, back on Earth?”

“The one you contacted Yellow Diamond with?” Steven asked.

“It was a mistake in retrospect!” Peridot protested with a little blush, before taking up a serious tone again. “You’ll recall that it exploded with some pretty serious force.”

“It was a pretty big explosion even through a bubble,” Steven recalled.

“Indeed. That same energy that powered that _significant_ detonation was just the leftover power of the device’s batteries that would ordinarily run it for about six minutes to a charge.”

“Oh,” Steven said, at the same time that Connie hissed through her teeth.

“You might only be able to muster enough energy to contact them for a matter of seconds before… running low, again,” Peridot postulated. “Or maybe, you’ll be fine tomorrow morning, and we’ll be able to just… walk this off like it never happened. Or maybe it’s not as expensive for you for some reason, because you seem to defy expectations everywhere else. I don’t know.”

“Maybe he won’t,” Connie muttered from the chair. “Maybe it isn’t. What then?”

Her eyes shot wide as she sat up.

“What’s our… what’s our survival strategy, even? We didn’t bring that much water. Water is heavy. We’ve got… three or four days of it? Less? Probably less.”

“We’ve got food,” Steven said, shrugging. “You can get water from food.”

“Some of it,” Connie said. “Not enough. Not close to enough. Peridot’s right.”

Steven’s stomach grumbled. The room was silent for a moment after that.

“Well,” Steven said, trying to keep cheer in his voice, “It’s definitely a lot harder to think while we’re hungry. Let’s get something to eat, and we’ll make a plan.”

Connie watched as Steven walked over to the MRE stash, a lurching a little from all the bruising. She was already considering a plan. It could start right away—she could change course if she saw reason to later.

“Actually, I’m not too hungry,” she said, as Steven tried to hand her a ‘brisket and beans’ MRE. “Also, we need to preserve what we have. If we’re going to start rationing, we might as well start now, right?”

“You sure?” Steven asked, raising an eyebrow in concern.

“Yeah. Besides, I probably shouldn’t be eating after being hurt this bad. Nausea can cause you to throw up, and we really can’t afford that right now.”

“Oh! That makes sense,” Steven said. He sat down on the floor next to her, and thumbed at the edge of his meal pack. “So, you’re probably just going to rest up, right?”

“Actually, I was wondering if Peridot wanted to take me with her, so we could look through the other two cargo pods. Get a proper inventory of the place.”

“On your leg?” Peridot said, raising an eyebrow. “Should you really be getting around on that?”

“It’s a lot better since Steven healed it a bit.” Connie wiggled her toes, testing the response. The tugs of muscles in her lower leg caused mild twinges of pain to shake their way upwards, but it was manageable. “If I have someone supporting me, the splint is enough. I’d probably be able to manage on my own if we had some crutches.”

“Crutches?” Peridot asked.

“They’re kinda like tall walking-sticks that you can brace in your armpits,” Steven explained. “We could probably make something like it, actually. That sounds worthwhile.”

“Right,” Peridot said, closing her eyes to think. “Well, I’m rested, but I’m not sure I’m energized enough to carry you about. You may just have to wait.”

“What? You’ve been resting for like, an hour and a half, right?”

“This ship wasn’t made for intergalactic voyages, and is _supposed_ to make interstellar legs within a week or two at the very most,” Peridot grumbled. “They didn’t see a reason why any gem on board would ever be completely drained. The light’s not high-intensity enough to properly recharge from—I have no clue how long it will take to build a decent store of power back.”

“Oh,” Connie said, wilting a bit. “Well, at least we won’t get sunburn.”

“That’s okay,” Steven said, perking up a little. “I can take you, Connie! First, we can stop by the drive room, and see if we can improvise some crutches, and then we’ll check out pods two and three.”

“…Sure!” Connie said. “Yeah. That sounds productive!”

 

With all the fallen scrap from the rafters in the drive room, there were plenty of vaguely-crutch sized pieces of metal. Steven was able to bend a couple into more appropriate shapes without much trouble—Connie had watched him in quiet awe as he manipulated the metal like firm taffy—but they had a fundamental problem for their intended use.

“Oof,” Connie eventually decided, after limping around on the almost-crutches for some time. The repurposed rafters rang out a pattern of _clunk_ -hop- _clunk_ -hop as she meandered to face Steven.

“You alright?” he asked, hovering close by her side to support her in case anything happened.

“Yeah,” she said, “But these are really heavy; I won’t be able to keep up with you on these.”

“Oh,” he said, feeling silly. Of course they’d be heavy. “I can try to find something lighter?”

Connie shook her head.

“Nah, I don’t see why this wouldn’t all be the same metal. Let’s just get moving. Put them near the door, though, so we don’t lose track of them. Might be handy later.”

 

“This looks a lot like Pod 1,” Steven commented as they wandered into Cargo Pod 3.

“Makes sense,” Connie said, grunting a bit as Steven helped her over the threshold. “Peridot said they were close in age. This one’s the newest one though, which is why it’s got hull-patch kits near both the doors.”

“Mm. It’s a lot less empty, though.”

Pod 1 had been entirely empty, except for a few ‘cellulose stacks.’ The middle deck of Pod 3, though, was crammed with them: off-white cubes about a meter to the side, stacked to the ceiling.

“It’s just more of these,” Steven said, leaving Connie leaned against one stack as he went to investigate. Absentmindedly, he picked one up like it was a wad of cotton. Connie nudged one of them herself—with her leg as it was, she couldn’t handle them quite so easily as Steven, but it was more a matter of balance than anything. They couldn’t have weighed more than five, maybe ten kilograms each.

“Pretty sure they’re not edible,” she said, experimenting with one near to her. She could scrape out the cellulose as powder with her fingernails, and it had about the texture and consistency of firm packing foam. In a fit of curiosity, she stuck some of the powder in her mouth, and frowned as it sat on her tongue for some time.

“Pleh,” she eventually decided. “Tastes like paper, but worse.”

“Cellulose is sugar, though, right?” Steven asked. “Shouldn’t it be tasty?”

“Cellulose is _made_ of sugar,” Connie said, “But it’s much different. Way harder to digest. If we were cows, we could probably eat it, but I’m guessing this is at most as energy-dense as celery.”

“Celery’s a food!”

“I think I heard that raw celery takes more calories to digest than it has calories,” Connie said with a giggle. “It’s a food because we cook it first, or else we eat it for its nutrients.”

“Aw. Wait, maybe we could cook this?”

Connie bit her lower lip and tilted her head.

“Maybe? I’m not optimistic, though. The easiest thing to make would be… I dunno, a cellulose soup. But we don’t have much water, and I’m not sure how we’d heat it if we did. And even then… I mean, it’d be like living off of paper soup. I don’t think we can _do_ that.”

“Hm. So, interesting, but not useful,” Steven said.

“Pretty much,” Connie agreed fidgeting nervously with her hair a little. “I wonder why the gems even need cellulose, honestly. And do they manufacture it? Or do they harvest it? Maybe they use it to make paper? So they can make art, or origami, or to write things?”

“I don’t think Homeworld places much value on art these days,” Steven said, helping Connie back up. She relaxed a little bit, leaning on her friend again. “Maybe that’ll change now that the Diamonds are a bit more… considerate-of-others-y, but if it does, it’ll be a while.”

“Yeah, fair enough,” Connie said, wincing. “The Diamonds don’t seem very, uh… very conducive to artistic freedom. Or, you know, freedom-freedom.”

“Heh. Yeah.” Steven glanced to her. “You okay to get going?”

“Yeah, sure. Just give me a sec.” Connie leaned her head against Steven’s fondly while she rested. When they started moving again, Connie felt more fit than before, and Steven felt more vital.

Collaboratively, they hobbled over to the nearest lift tube. Just like Pod 1, Pod 3 had four of them, two at the front and two at the back: intimidatingly large shafts about three meters across, empty the whole way down. A vague buzz of energy ran through their hair as they approached, the energetic field of the tube touching the air with static.

Steven attempted to set the tube to take them to the correct floor, but got lost in navigating the panel’s menu quickly. Connie giggled, and pushed his hand to the side.

“Here, let me. You’re in the settings.”

“Oh,” Steven said, his ears getting red.

“Don’t worry! It’s just… here, see? Each button is a deck. It’s like an elevator!”

“Oh! Got it.” He snuck his hand under Connie’s to jab the lowest button on the screen.

“Steven!”

“I like pushing buttons,” he declared, taking a step forward towards the shaft.

“Wait wait wait,” Connie stammered as Steven moved forward. “Hold up, not so fast!”

“Ah! What’s wrong?” he looked her over. “Your leg?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. Her leg hurt, but it was the same dull ache as usual. “I’m just worried the tube’s gonna break midway. Don’t wanna get dropped.”

A gentle tug from the transport tube suggested that they should go down, but it was easy enough to resist the invisible force as they leaned forward to look down the shaft. A fall of some ten or more meters leered unsettlingly back at them.

“Normally, I’d say we’d be fine, but with our luck so far…” Steven muttered. “I’m not exactly used to being scared of heights. My floating was working fine when I was in the drive room, but if my healing and my dreaming are being weird, we don’t want to count on that, right?”

“Right,” Connie said, hopping back from the edge a bit. “I’m not a fan of that drop. Also, this is a transport tube for cargo and gems who shift cargo. I’m worried it might be a bit rough.”

“I’ve got some lint in my pocket,” Steven said. “I could toss that down, see what it does?”

“We wouldn’t be able to follow that,” Connie said, shaking her head. She looked behind her and tapped Steven’s shoulder to get his attention. “How about one of these… stacks? Cubes. One of these.”

“Oh! Yeah. Seems easy!”

A few moments later, they were peering down again, watching a block of cellulose slide down the tube, falling much slower than the gravity would ordinarily take it. As it reached the level below them, an invisible force ejected the block from the tube at modest speed.

“Seems safe,” Steven reasoned.

“Yeah,” Connie said, “But it looks a little fast on the landing.”   

“No worse than a small jump.”

“Exactly,” Connie said, with a small wince.

“Oh. Right,” Steven said awkwardly, but cheerily. “Well… I can take the landing! I’ll just have to carry you down.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Connie agreed, less than enthused at the prospect of climbing onto anyone. Still, getting into Steven’s arms was more comfortable than it ever should have been—he managed himself around her injured with an uncanny finesse, and with a nervous wobble, they hopped into the lift tube.

“Woah,” Connie muttered as floated down. “Weird.”

“It’s like falling through pudding,” Steven complained, shuddering.

“What?” Connie grinned at him. “It’s not like that at all!”

“It’s not what floating is supposed to feel like,” he pouted.

“Yeah, like you could do any better,” she teased.

“I totally—” Steven puffed up as he realized Connie was just riling him. “Connie!”

“Sorry,” she snickered.

“You shouldn’t pick on your landing gear like that,” Steven said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “Alright, here’s our stop!”

The next floor slid into view slowly, revealing a deck crammed with canisters. Connie squeezed her eyes shut for the painful bounce of landing, but even as the lift tube ejected them, Steven added his own power to compensate, letting them drift serenely to the floor.

“See?” Steven insisted, setting her down gently. “I float _much_ better.”

“Show-off,” Connie grumbled fondly.

They looked around for a couple seconds before a melancholy feeling overtook them.

“There’s uh… not much here, is there?” Steven said.

“Well, there’s these… bottles,” Connie said, prodding one of the canisters. They were each about her height and about as wide around as her head. They looked like they were made to be handled fairly lightly—the shape was kind of like an oxygen bottle—but she couldn’t even budge it. “Oh, holy cow. They’re heavier than they look.”

“Oh?” Steven walked over to one and tried to nudge it himself, and frowned as it remained stalwart. “Oh.”

He planted himself more firmly, and with a little bit of grunting, managed to wiggle the bottle some.

“Wow,” he said. “Either those are _crazy_ heavy, or I’m a _lot_ less strong than normal.”

“Or both,” Connie said, inspecting the bottles for any type of identification. “They’re labeled, but Peridot’s translation-thing didn’t get to them. We’ll have to get her to read it for us.”

“Huh.” Steven said. “You want to look around some more, or just move on to another level? Kinda looks like it’s just these bottles.”

“Yeah,” Connie admitted. “Let’s just take one last look around and we’ll head to the next floor—”

She cut herself off with a frown.

“Hey, Steven. We went to the right level, right?”

“Uhh… we just went to the next one down. It’s not like there’s a wrong one, right?”

“No, I mean… there’s _nothing_ here but these bottles.”

Steven looked around, and verified her statement. “Um, yeah.”

“Then,” Connie said, growing uneasy. “Where’s that cube we tossed down here earlier?”

Steven eyed the path through the bottles between the center of the deck and the lift tube with mounting suspicion. Little white flecks of what was presumably cellulose speckled the ground, but certainly not enough to count for the entire missing cubic meter.

“I… don’t know,” Steven said.

They stared in silence for a couple moments.

“Connie?” Steven asked.

“Yeah Steven?”

“I’m feeling… very creeped out right now.”

“…me too. It’s probably nothing, though, right? Maybe it just… went to a different floor than we thought?”

“…I kinda want to go bring Peridot with us.”

“She’s not exactly in a state to protect us from anything,” Connie said. “We’re probably just as safe on our own.”

Steven surveyed the room before whispering a quiet reminder to Connie.

“She’s also not exactly in a state to protect herself.”

“I think… we should go get Peridot,” Connie agreed with a grimace.

Casting a pair of nervous stares about the room, the two began to creep out of the room. Their discretion was elevated to panic as one of the cannisters fell over with a clang, setting into effect a banging din as the metal cylinders began to fall like so many bowling pins.

 

Peridot roused with a start as Steven bounded into the cockpit with Connie in his arms, wailing about the ship being haunted.

“All I wanted,” she muttered to herself, “Was a little rest.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for missing my update last week! I was taking some well-earned time off for spring break, but now it's back to the grind!


	7. Chapter 7

“I’ll admit that it’s creepy,” Peridot said, surveying the mess in Pod 2. Fallen canisters littered the quarter of the deck closest to the lift tube, but most of them still stood upright. “But I wouldn’t say this means the ship is haunted.”

“I tried to tell him that,” Connie muttered, “But he wasn’t in the mood to listen.”

“I said ‘haunted’ once,” Steven said, flushing. “Just once.”

“I mean, I never said I blamed you for it,” Connie said. “It’s still really creepy. Can you uh, set me down over there?”

“Roger!” Steven bounded over the scattered canisters with a floating hop, wobbling a bit as he kept Connie steady in his arms and Peridot balanced on his back.

“I thought Steven was supposed to be resting,” Peridot noted. “Not hauling everyone around like a curly-haired pack-beast.”

“You guys are light!” Steven reassured Peridot, “And I only need to carry Connie for the lift tubes, really.”

True to his word, he set her down as soon as he landed. Connie had opted to take one of the makeshift crutches with her despite its cumbersome weight. She’d also brought her sword, wrapped and slung over her back. She didn’t expect to get much practical use out of either, but it reassured her that if she was separated from the others, she at least wouldn’t be totally helpless.

“You don’t need to carry me at all, though,” Peridot grumbled.

She’d brought nothing other than a pen and a pad of paper that she’d raided from Steven’s supplies to map Pod 1 the first time Connie had gone out cold. Already, she was continuing her list of the ship’s contents, and was still finding it inconveniently sparse.

“I’m helping you conserve energy,” Steven said cheerily.

“I’ll be honest, I’m kinda on Peridot’s side with this one,” Connie said quietly. “Peridot can get as much energy as she needs from her gem. Maybe she’ll need to rest more to charge, but we’re limited by food.”

“I mean, I have a gem too,” Steven figured. “That’s got to be worth something.”

The three stopped to consider that.

“I’ll be honest,” Peridot started, “I have no clue. Surely his human body needs _some_ sustenance.”

“I don’t _have_ a human body,” Steven said, uncomfortably. “I’m not a gem, but… I’m not human.”

“…Right.” Peridot blushed furiously. Steven was bothered enough by his hybrid origins without her clutzily dropping mistakes in.

“It’s a good line of thought, though,” Connie said, pondering aloud. “How much does Steven get from his gem? Does he need both light and food, or does he only need one?”

Steven walked through the rows of canisters warily, looking carefully for hiding spots. The missing cellulose stack still sat heavily on his mind. Connie followed slowly behind, grunting a little with each hop on her heavy crutch.

“…Should Steven be wearing a crop top, to maximize the light his gem collects?” Connie mused idly. Peridot snickered at the image, but Steven considered it quietly.

“I don’t like crop tops,” he complained after some thought, rubbing one of his arms near the shoulder. “They make me feel really exposed. And kind of ugly.”

“Steven! You’re not ugly!” Connie said.

“I just—”

“It wouldn’t do much good anyway,” Peridot announced loudly, trying to draw the conversation away from body-image. “His shirt is thin, and that especially doesn’t mean much to the shorter-wavelength light that gems prefer. Besides, there’s not much to work with here, and Steven’s gem is… of a different calibre than most. A bit of low-frequency, low-intensity ship lighting probably won’t make any difference.”

“You’re saying that his gem would generate more than the light it collects?” Connie asked. She felt like she was understanding the resource problem better.

“Probably?” Peridot shrugged. “Since Steven doesn’t tend to run around shirtless and he also doesn’t tend to seek out unshielded gamma-ray sources, I’m guessing his diet accounts for any of the energy he might need from light, if he needs any at all.”

“Right,” Connie said, nodding. She grunted as she took her next hopping step. “Oof. I don’t know which muscles I’m working, but they’re going to be absolutely massive by the time we’re out of this.”

 _If we get out of this,_ she added on in her head. She was seeing fewer and fewer paths to survival.

“You’re going to be lopsided,” Steven joked, trying to take his mind off things. “Like those crabs with the big arms.”

“Don’t all crabs have big arms?” Peridot asked, confused. “What’s the point of a crab with small arms? It would be bad at crabbing.”

“There’s a type of crab with a really big arm on one side, and a really small one on the other,” Connie clarified. “Fiddler crabs, I think.”

“That’s weird.”

“ _Crabs_ are weird,” Connie clarified. “They start out as weird larva, and have a bunch of different weird life stages. Like butterflies, except that they’re weird and hungry all the way through.”

Steven crouched down to examine one of the fallen bottles more closely.

“Woah,” he said, touching it near the bottom where it had slightly dented the deck. “These things are seriously heavy.”

Peridot clambered over Steven’s hair to lean forward over one of the bottles, squinting.

“Stars, no wonder this hulk handled like a fat… fat…”

“Fat cow?” Connie suggested.

“Sure,” Peridot agreed. “One of those. These are _fluid hypercondensers!_ ”

“So, they’re full of pressurized liquid?” Connie asked.

“It could be gas,” Steven suggested. “They look kinda like big versions of the oxygen bottles, for people with breathing problems.”

“First of all, calling them pressurized is understating it,” Peridot said, holding up a finger, “These bottles are ‘pressurized’ in the same way a pulsar ‘rotates.’ They’re ‘dense’ like oceans are ‘wet.’ They ‘contain fluid’ like—”

“We get it, Peri,” Steven chuckled.

“Well, obviously,” Peridot said, rolling her eyes. “I explained it to you. Anyway, depending on how dense their contents are, each bottle could contain up to three tons of fluid.”

“That seems right,” Steven said, reflecting on how difficult it’d been to budge the one he had experimented with earlier. “Probably less, actually, but they’re heavy.”

“Second,” Peridot continued, “According to the labels, they’ve got liquid in them, so that would be a point to Connie.”

“A point? We weren’t competing,” Connie protested, smiling. “But I guess I’ll take it.”

“Darn,” Steven said, “What kind of liquid? Maybe I get a point if I was close.”

“Terraforming solvent.”

“Yeesh.” Connie leaned a little back from the condenser she was closest too. “That sounds like an _acid._ ”

“So… don’t open these,” Steven said, standing up straight.

“There’s…” Connie did some counting of the bottles around the edges. “There’s like, forty to fifty across each side of the deck. That’s like, twenty-five hundred tons of acid.”

“Solvent,” Peridot corrected. “It could be basic, or use a different corrosion mechanism.”

“Whatever,” Connie said. “That’s… a ton of acid.”

“No, it’s twenty—”

“A _figurative_ ton of acid,” Steven amended.

“That’s a stupid figure,” Peridot muttered as Connie continued.

“You think that’s enough to flood the whole ship? That’s a lot of acid.”

“Maybe?” Peridot said, biting her lip in thought, “Probably not, though. Maybe enough to flood any of the cargo pods, but we’d need to test how dense the solvent is outside the bottle.”

“That sounds like a risky test,” Connie said, frowning.

“D’you think these’re why the ship broke down?” Steven asked, perusing the bottles that were still standing. Mostly, he was looking for labels that looked any different from the others. “Is it overloaded?”

“It wouldn’t explain everything,” Peridot said, “Cargo ships are _meant_ to haul stupid amounts of junk around. But if there are other decks loaded like this… it certainly wouldn’t help matters. This deck alone is a heavy load.”

“Want to check?” Steven asked, inclining his head towards the nearest lift tube. “I kinda want to get this done. I’m tired, and hungry.”

“You can stop and eat whenever you want,” Connie replied, quickly. “You’re kind of our phone home.”

“Nah,” Steven said, waving a hand. “I won’t be able to focus on anything until we get this done.”

 

The next deck down—and the last deck in Pod 3—felt simultaneously more and less open. It was just as packed with canisters, and actually had less floor space overall: the side bulkheads were closer to the lift tubes in order to make room for the pair of airlocks on either side of the room. Yet the presence of the airlocks meant also the presence of viewing ports, two on either side of either airlock. The glimpse into the depths of space was a humbling reminder of the thin separation between the stuffy cabin air and hard vacuum.

“More hypercondensers,” Peridot noted with disappointment.

“Yeah,” Connie noted from Steven’s arms, not even bothering to get down. “Same stuff?”

“Looks like it,” Steven said. He couldn’t read the gem language, but they were the exact same labels in each case. “We should probably check all of them, just to be sure, though.”

“Yeah,” Connie said, frowning. “I guess.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just being a bit spoiled,” she admitted. “Not looking forward to getting on my feet again.”

“I was kinda worried about moving you around so much while your leg’s still hurt,” Steven said. “Want me to leave you here, and come back and get you when we’re done?”

“I mean…” Connie trailed off in thought. She wasn’t sure.

One of the airlocks began hissing menacingly at them. The three jumped and watched the port-side airlock as the tone slowly built in volume before dying away suddenly.

“I think I’d like to come with you,” Connie said quickly.

“I think I’d like to leave,” Peridot said, clinging to Steven’s hair.

Steven stared at the offending door.

“Steven?” Connie said, tugging his sleeve. “You okay?”

“I’m seriously spooked out,” he said, quietly. “Can one of you set the lift tube while I watch this?”

“I’d _really_ like to leave,” Peridot reminded them in a whimper. “I’d like to leave, I’d like to leave.”

“Peridot!” Connie said, firmly. “If you want to leave, set the tube. I can’t reach the panel from here.”

Peridot blinked.

“Right. Yes! Right. I can do that.”

She hopped off Steven with grunt, before scuttling over to the control panel to toggle its floor setting. As the three backed into the lift tube, the airlock stayed resolutely silent.

“Wait a second,” Connie said, blinking as the gentle tug of the lift tube enveloped them. “That hissing… was that a hull breach? Did we just walk away from a hull breach?”

“A hull breach would set off an alarm,” Peridot said, shaking her head as she clambered back onto Steven. “The only thing that could have been… it must have been the airlock repressurizing.”

“That means there’s someone else on this ship,” Steven said, shuddering.

“We have a stowaway!” Connie said, her eyes wide.

“Not anymore,” Peridot said, quietly. “The only way the airlock would be _re_ pressurizing is if someone had taken it through a whole cycle. Which can only be conducted from inside the airlock.”

“We just came from a gem colony,” Connie noted. “Gems don’t need an atmosphere! They could hide on the outside of the ship!”

“You don’t get it,” Peridot said, “The ship doesn’t extend its artificial gravity to open airlocks. With the ship spinning at this rate…”

A chill ran through Connie’s spine, rattling through her body to the hands holding her, then all the way to down to Steven’s toes and back again.

“…You’d get flung out into space,” she realized aloud. “A gem… they’d never die.”

“If that _was_ a stowaway,” Peridot rubbed her arms, looking thoroughly disturbed. “They just met a terrible fate.”

“Why would someone do that?” Connie whispered.

“Maybe they didn’t realize?” Peridot suggested.

“I mean, there’s another option,” Steven said. “Maybe the ship _is_ haunted. Gruesome hallucinations are a haunting thing.”

“I hate that option more than the first!” Connie complained.

“That’s… that’s not what’s happening. Ghosts are a human fabrication!” Peridot declared using a voice that sounded like it still needed convincing.

“I don’t know about that,” Steven said as he watched the deck of cellulose stacks pass by. “Maybe human ghosts are… but I think gem ghosts might be. Neither of you saw that painting on Hessonite’s colony.”

“That was still a material _thing,_ though,” Peridot hissed. “An _object._ ”

“Kind of.” Steven squeezed Connie’s arm nervously.

“…Maybe it was just the ship being broken?” Connie suggested, hopefully. That involved nobody jumping into space, and also no ghosts.

“Yes!” Peridot declared. “That’s the obvious solution!”

“Or maybe the next deck is full of corpses or gem shards or something, like a horror movie.” Steven meant for it to be a joke, but the three of them held their breath in anticipation as the next floor slid into view.

But for a corner of terraforming solvent bottles, the deck was empty. They breathed a collective sigh of relief, but remained tense as they searched the rest of Pod 3. Moving to the next deck up was particularly harrowing, since it mirrored the bottom deck. They watched the airlocks closely as they gave a passing look over the deck’s contents. Mostly, it was more hypercondensers, but against the port-side bulkhead, there was something they hadn’t seen before.

Fist-sized ‘pill’ objects were stacked in a loose, plastic-like mesh. The pills were separated into two clear halves down the middle: their ‘bottoms’ were all opaque and white, while their ‘tops’ were colored vividly. The pills were sorted by their color, with red-whites, blue-whites, and green-whites dominating their number.

“Huh,” Peridot said, quietly. “Flares.”

“Flares?” Steven asked, hope building. “Couldn’t we use these to signal for help?”

“Light is limited to light-speed,” Peridot said, critically. “Might as well be useless, since we’re in deep space.”

“I mean, it’s something to consider,” Connie said, leaning against a solvent bottle. She watched the airlock on the other side of the pod closely as she spoke. “We can’t use them to call for help, but if we throw some bright lights outside, it’ll probably make us easier to find, right?”

“I suppose,” Peridot grunted. “But we could do the same thing by rigging together a radio, and I think that’s less risky than monkeying with the airlocks.”

 

With that, they’d searched all of Pod 3, and moved on to Pod 2. The walls were less smooth and more metallic, and the lighting dimmer.

The floor was littered with a mess of cellulose stacks and small dark cubes, scattered haphazardly about the space. Many of the cellulose stacks had broken apart into pieces, as if dropped from fair height.

“Wait, we peeked in here when we first got on,” Connie said, “And it was _not_ this messy.”

“Guess the ghost missed us?” Steven joked nervously.

“Actually, I’d be worried if they _weren’t_ knocked over,” Peridot said, hopping off Steven’s back. “There’s a proper explanation this time.”

“ _Please_ tell me it explains the first time things fell over, too,” Connie said.

“Pod 2 doesn’t have its own gravity, it just mirror’s the ship’s gravity,” Peridot explained. “It’s the oldest of the cargo pods, back from when gems actually used cargo ships regularly. Before warp pads got cheap.”

“Why does that explain anything?” Steven asked. “I mean, it’s good to know that it’ll probably break first, I guess, but…”

Connie’s leg twinged with pain, reminding her…

“Oh!” she realized. “We had to turn the gravity off for a bit to get my leg free.”

“Exactly,” Peridot said. Nothing strange had happened for at least twenty minutes, and she was starting to feel in control of the situation again. She trotted into the pod jovially, hopping over an obstructing chunk of cellulose. “All this clutter is the perfectly expected mess that you’d expect after suspending the gravity of a spinning ship.”

Steven and Connie followed with renewed confidence, and as Connie looked around to observe the pod, she laughed.

“Ha! Score!”

“What?” Steven asked.

“Actual _elevators!_ ” Connie said, pointing at the lift tubes with a silly grin. Sure enough, the older pod lacked the bare tubes of the previous pods, and instead boasted a bulky lift platform in each tube.

“Oh, neat,” Steven agreed, a little bit more mildly.

“Ugh,” Peridot groaned. “They’re… primitive.”

“Yeah, complain all you want,” Connie said, “But I can ride these on my own, and that makes them the better already.”

“True enough…” Peridot muttered.

They gave a cursory inspection to the mess on the floor—with a sniff and a lick, Peridot identified the small dark cubes mixed into the clutter as being made of graphite.

“Cellulose and graphite… maybe they are art supplies!” Connie joked.

“Maybe,” Steven said, nodding more seriously.

“The graphite is likely there just a compact way to transport carbon,” Peridot figured. “The cellulose… I’ve got no clue.”

 

Exploring the higher decks of Pod 2 proved more or less a bust. The first deck up was actually empty, and the decks above that were stacked (or rather, scattered—the gravity shift had been no more kind on the higher levels) with flares, graphite, and yet more cellulose. The only thing of any real note was a pattern of scorchmarks on the top deck of Pod 2, where a pile of flares had gone off at some point. An ill smell lingered on that deck, but Peridot was confident it was ‘nothing in toxic concentrations.’

The first deck below main level was another uninteresting mess of flares, but the next deck down proved more intimidating. A familiar sight: another deck full of fluid condensers. Familiar also was that the condensers had been scattered haphazardly along the deck, but unlike in Pod 3 where the condensers had toppled over, and unlike the chaos in the upper decks of Pod 2 where the scattered cargo had been lighter, here the deck had taken serious damage. The floor was warped and buckled from the heavy condensers’ brief stint into zero-G.

“Yikes,” Connie hissed, surveying the damage. “Looks like a hurricane came through.”

“Or an earthquake,” Steven agreed.

“The denting is superficial,” Peridot analyzed. “The deck is layered—the paneling here is nearly completely trashed, but it did its job of protecting the circuitry underneath. The maintenance of this craft is one thing, but the actual designers of it knew their stuff.”

“Right,” Connie said, nodding. “I guess it’s kind of impressive that the ship’s still in one piece after that spinout, huh?”

“Next floor, then?” Steven said.

“Sure,” Connie nodded. Peridot offered no reason to stay, so Steven reached out of the lift for the control panel next, and pressed the button.

The lift started downward with an electric hum, the machinery controlling it sounding almost human in its noise and mechanism. It was an almost comforting feeling: when everything in the ship seemed prime to fail, something familiar-sounding, something accessible to human engineering, promised the possibility of repair.

As the floor above them reached their noses, though, something else was audible on the edge of Connie’s hearing. Something else familiar, Earth-like.

“Do you hear that?” She asked the others.

“Hear _what?_ ” Peridot asked incredulously. She didn’t want to get into arguments about ‘ghosts’ again.

“That sound, it kinda sounds like…”

“The ocean!” Steven said, noticing it too.

“Yeah!” Connie agreed.

Peridot frowned. Now _she_ could hear it.

The lift platform cleared the floor they’d been on, letting air from that final deck into the lift. And it smelled glorious! For just a moment, it was glorious. Like the ocean, but without the stench of fish or animal, the clean humidity from a rainy day mixed with a touch of sea-brine. For just a moment.

 

The bottom deck of Cargo Pod 2 was completely flooded.

 

Water rushed up to their knees in less than a second, not so much pouring into the lift as it was displaced by the lift’s accelerating descent.

“It’s flooded!” Peridot called out in a panic.

“Stay calm!” Steven responded. “We can just float if the lift goes all the way down!”

The stinging pain that could only be cold water literally salting her wound distracted Connie at first, but she quickly realized the danger she was in.

“My leg!” She cried out.

“You’ll be fine!” Steven said, trying to stay calm. “You can float on your back!”

“No! My splint! It’s weighing me down!”

Steven and Peridot watched for an instant of horror as surely enough, the weight of Connie’s makeshift splint kept her firmly to the bottom of the lift even as the rising water buoyed them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically I'm ten minutes late for Saturday release, but technically, it's been weeks since I've released an update, and it's my first day on the Saturday update schedule, so...
> 
> Finals are soon, so I'm hoping I'll have more time to write as things close out school-wise. 
> 
> For those who care, Stevonnie is next chapter.


	8. Chapter 8

The lift continued to drop into the flooded deck, bringing the water now to their chests.

“Connie, hold on!” Peridot kicked over to her. “You can stand on my shoulders!”

“Then what?” She blinked away a tear of pain—the stinging, searing, itching pain wherever her battered leg had bled. “Won’t work forever!”

“I’ve got an idea!” Steven said, “Just wait there, it’ll be fine!”

“Whatever you’re thinking of, do it quickly!” Peridot shouted as Steven disappeared under the water with a quiet _bloop._ He dove straight down, using the lift platform first and then the edges of the lift tube to push off of, heading down to the lift control panel.

Connie cried out as the waterline splashed up to her armpits. She dropped her crutch to tread the water as well as she could, and kicked with her good leg to stay above the surface. The kicking bothered her injury, but it was better than drowning.

“Hold on, Connie!”

“I’m. _Trying!_ ” Connie said, gritting her teeth and kicking harder. Her arms contributed more to keeping her afloat when they were partway out of the water, but the weight of her newly-soaked clothes and splint were too much to compensate for. “A little help would be nice!”

Peridot dived under the water. Gems had a novel way to reduce their buoyancy: they could inhale water without any negative consequence. Peridot dropped to the bottom of the lift like a stone, crouched down, and slowly rose towards Connie’s kicking leg, grabbing it to guide her. Panting, Connie found purchase and stood straight on Peridot’s shoulders, taking a moment to rest.

Peridot stood slowly as the lift descended, letting the rising water lighten her load as the went while keeping Connie as far above the water as she could. It was working, but it had a firm limit: Peridot was only so tall.

Connie’s heart began to beat harder and harder, blood roaring in her ears. The water passed her shoulders, and she lifted up onto her toes in response. It caught back up, then touched her chin. Connie realized she was going to have to keep herself above water, that standing wouldn’t cut it, so she kicked off to get her arms at surface-level, and started treading water again.

Peridot watched helplessly from below as the lift sunk further, each inch feeling like a mile. She could still reach up to touch Connie, but worried that grabbing or holding up a foot to try to help could pull her down instead.

Steven fumbled around with the lift control panel. It took him a few seconds working blind, but eventually…

_Chk-thunk._

The lift made a rattling noise, and reversed direction. Peridot watched as Steven shot up to the surface beside them. Connie saw him emerge coughing and gasping: he was barely even able to fit his head between the ceiling and the surface of the water, so thoroughly the deck had been flooded.

“Connie! Are you okay?” Steven splashed around blindly, his eyes closed tight—the salt in the water was better painful. He tried to blink it free, but more splashed into his eye as he bobbed.

Connie tried to respond, but she couldn’t keep her buoyancy: the weight of the splint and her soaked clothes were too much to support with only her arms and one leg. Connie held her breath as she slipped beneath the surface. Perhaps a different person would have panicked here, but Connie was a human of exceptional grit. More than keeping her composure, Connie began to relax as she caught up with the situation. Rather than flail pointlessly as she sunk, she searched with her good leg, reaching about until her foot found Peridot’s rising shoulders.

The two or three seconds before the lift pushed her back above the water were agonizing—the salty water stung her eyes shut too, and between the darkness and her useless leg, there was an irrational moment where she feared she’d never breathe again. But only a moment.

“Connie?” Steven was shouting as she emerged. “Connie!”

“Steven!” Connie responded. “Steven, over here!”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” Connie called back. “But the lift’s going to leave without you!”

“Ackplth!” was the noise Steven made as he realized that he needed to get moving. He started swimming in the rough direction of the lift, was still swimming blind—briny water wasn’t the sort to open your eyes in. Connie calling out to him, guiding him in, and by following her voice, Steven swiftly made it back to the lift.

 

The three of them stood panting and dripping as the lift stopped back at the main level, the one scattered about with cubes of graphite and cellulose. Peridot was in a way the best off of the three, but looked the worst as she coughed up streams of water. Steven looked like he’d just been thrown off a cliff into the ocean, while Connie looked and felt like she’d been thrown off the same cliff and hit a rock on the way down. The two of them were shivering badly.

After a few seconds, Steven started giggling nervously.

“I haven’t been that scared for a good hour,” he quipped.

Connie stared at him for a second or so before she couldn’t stand it either, and started laughing too. Peridot looked between the two like they’d gone loony.

“Well,” Connie said, wiping away a tear, “H-how were we supposed to know that gems kept swimming pools on cargo ships?”

“They - _don’t!_ ” Peridot insisted, irritated. Her ‘lag’ was flaring up a little bit after the excitement, but it was only barely noticeable. “It’s like it was put there _specifically_ to scare someone!”

“I mean, I don’t think it was supposed to be there,” Steven said as the giggles subsided. He led the trio out of the elevator absent-mindedly. “I stubbed my toe on another one of those hyper-condensy-thingies on my way back up. Maybe there was a leak?”

“Huh,” Connie said, quietly. “Guess t-that makes us lucky, right?”

“You know,” Peridot said wryly, “I don’t really think of ‘nearly drowned’ as lucky.”

“It could be worse,” Connie said, smiling grimly. “We could’vve been in a pool of that terraforming solvent.”

“Yeesh,” Steven muttered.

“Wait!” Peridot said, slapping her forehead. “I’m an idiot!”

“Hey! That’s not true!” Steven said, reaching a hand out to her.

“Ngaaah! I just feel stupid,” Peridot groaned, holding her head in her hands. “You _were_ in a pool of terraforming solvent. Gems terraform using _water._ Lapis Lazulis control water, use it to erode rock into sediment. Terraforming solvent.”

“I mean, that doesn’t really seem like a big mistake,” Connie said, slowing down. She was tiring out, badly. “D-do you mind if I rest here?” She indicated a cube of cellulose at about the right height.

“Go ahead,” Steven replied under his breath as he waited for Peridot to respond.

“I guess not,” Peridot decided eventually, wandering gloomily over to a dark cube of carbon. “I just feel silly.”

“Silly’s fine,”  Steven said.

“I f-feel silly all the time,” Connie said, nodding in agreement.

“Hey, wait!” Peridot realized, brightening up suddenly. “This ship is _full_ of water! You guys are going to be fine! Or I mean, you’re not going to die of thirst, anyway!”

“Hate t-to break it to you,” Connie said, yawning, “But that was salt water. Humans can’t drink salt water.”

Peridot blinked at them for a couple of seconds, before putting a finger to her chin.

“I mean, it can’t be too hard to get salt out of the water, right?”

“We could boil it,” Steven suggested. “I mean, I don’t know how we’d get it liquid again, but it would get the salt out.”

“Mmaybe we can work that out later,” Connie said, nodding. “I t-think… I need to get some rest.”

“Yeah, are you okay?” Steven asked, a bit concerned. “You sound a bit off.”

Connie’s leg throbbed in time with her heartbeat.

“‘M fine.” she lied.

Steven and Peridot both gave her a dubious look.

“Are you sure about that?” Steven asked. “I’ve been having a lot of trouble reading you. Ever since—”

“I’m fine!” Connie insisted through grit teeth. She shuddered. “I just… hurt a lot. Getting tired. Kicking made leg worse… and honestly, I just want to sleep.”

Peridot frowned. Something seemed off, but…

Steven nodded. “Yeah, okay. Some rest seems pretty smart. You want to grab food first?”

Connie shook her head a little too emphatically.

“I ate while you were unconscious,” she said, “and I’ll have trouble sleeping if I eat f-first. I just want dry clothes… and rest.”

 

‘Restful’ is not how Steven’s sleep went.

 

**...**

_Space is cold, and empty. It is not dark, because the universe unveils its light show more brashly, more earnestly than even the most daring of artists. And yet it is dark, because the light show is not for us. It is not—_

**Enough.**

_It is not for anyone. It simply is. The canv—_

**Enough!**

_The canvas is here before us._

**We no longer wish to see it. Take from us our vision. End our sight. End our pain.**

_It is not for us to choose how long we live._

**It is for… for you. You.**

_It is not for anyone._

**It is for you. We beg you.**

_There is still light. There is still h—_

**Yet we beg for darkness alone. We see these things. They pain us.**

_Suffering can be made into growth._

**We cannot grow.**

_We will make do. You will come when you can._

**You will come!**

_Help comes when it is able, not when it is needed._

**It is needed.**

_We must be patient._

**It is needed!**

 

Steven shot up with a start, heart hammering. The echoes of voices… no, of thoughts, lingered in his head. What did they say? His memory failed him.

A moment of confusion. He was in his sleeping bag, but was not in the place he had put it. He’d rested his sleeping bag down near Connie’s side, where she’d unzipped her own sleeping  bag so that she could rest in her chair and use it as a blanket.

But now, he was in space. Not in the depths of space, but… near Earth, in fact. He could see it, like a glittering blue quarter in the distance. Well, more purplish than blue, through his bubble. He tapped his bubble cautiously, his breath fogging up the side in the thin, thin air. It’d been a while since he’d dreamed of this.

 **“You left us behind,”** a voice said, plaintive and enraged at once. A voice steeped in something inhuman, pitched and otherworldly. Steven whipped his head around for the source. Eyeball—the Ruby with the eye-gem, the old veteran of the war on Earth—stared back at him through the pink bubble-shield. Her eye was cracked, and she lay against the side of the bubble on her knees, her functional eye staring through with intensity.

“I didn’t,” Steven said, quietly.

**“You did! You abandoned us.”**

“No, I…” Steven felt that he was supposed to say something something else. He slumped a little. “Although… I suppose I did, didn’t I?”

 **“You admit to your failure?”** The crack in the Ruby’s eye spread. It spread beyond the confines of her gem, fissures opening wide on her brow and the side of her head.

“I mean, I kinda did fail you. Or at least, it wasn’t very nice of us to leave you stranded in space,” Steven said. “We could have rescued you right after we rescued me. Instead we just… waited.”

 **“You are misplacing your guilt,”** Eyeball snapped. **“It belongs elsewhere.”**

“Good point,” Steven said, smiling a little. He chuckled and shook his head. “We still would have found you, I guess, and at least I healed your gem. And I guess it’s a good thing Homeworld found you. I hope it’s a good thing, anyway. Homeworld does some pretty awful things, but you seemed fine.”

**“You cannot imagine the horrors.”**

“I don’t think I have to,” he said, shuddering. “That Hessonite’s got to be the most pointlessly evil gem I’ve ever seen. Maybe even worse than the Diamonds _ever_ were. I hope we can find some way to put her away for good. Man, I hope they don’t need me to convince Blue of anything…”

 **“You will fail. You did not try—didn’t even try to save us!”** Eyeball hissed, pounding on the bubble with her fists. The crack spread from her eye down to her hand, and from her hand to the bubble itself. Eyeball’s voice was overlaid upon the hissing noise of atmosphere escaping through the fractures. **“You abandoned us! Despair!”**

“Yikes,” Steven said, shifting back a bit with a grimace. “This is getting a little weird, even for one of my dreams. You’re going to have to mellow out right now, or I’m changing the channel.”

 **“Dream?** **_Dream?_ ** **There is no dream!”** Eyeball keened, her voice growing more distorted still. **“There is only suffer! Suffer and suffer and suffer and—”**

“Eesh,” Steven said. “Yeah, that’s enough of that.”

He waved his hands in front of him like he was pulling open curtains, and even as Eyeball’s wailing escalated to shrieking, the scene around him dissolved to nothing.

“Why can’t I just have normal sleep anymore?” Steven complained to himself with a sigh, surveying his new environment. A flat plane of off-white emptiness at his feet, and a dark and starry sky above him. Far off in the distance, a blue-white light shone out from the direction of the floor.

“Alright,” he grumbled, starting off towards the light. “I get it, ‘go over here.’ Geeze, why can’t dreams just put you where they want you to be? What if I don’t want to walk, huh? I coulda just sat there.”

 

After what simultaneously felt like hours and no time at all—Steven leaned towards the actual amount of time spent being the latter, seeing as dreams had a way of making things seem to take longer than they actually did—he arrived to a hole in the ‘floor’ of the dream, about twice as far across as he was tall. Peering down into the hole revealed yet more space, though this space was more specific: he saw the _Molten Core_ , twisting in the void. Or rather, he saw its ruins.

The ship had been twisted into pieces, spinning farther and farther away, before passing over… well, a ‘horizon’ was the closest word that came to mind. Visually, it appeared to separate into two distinct ‘streams’ of space, tracing out a circle as they progressed in the opposite direction to its previous motion. Then, the two streams reunited, and the ship emerged on the opposite side, and again changed direction so that were approaching from the other horizon.

Steven watched it happen a couple of times before he caught the clue that made the reality of the situation obvious: the volume that the wreckage was circling was an empty, starless backdrop to an otherwise starry sky.

“There’s something there,” he realized. “It’s orbiting a black hole!”

 _What’s the point of dreaming this?_ he wondered. Something in the back of his mind made him feel like he was being watched. Scanning the horizon, he saw nothing in front of him. There was nothing on his left, or behind him, or to his right…

But when he looked back in front of himself again, Eyeball was there, standing on the other side of the hole, teeth grit. Fractures spread across the space around her as she reached out for him. Steven startled, then frowned.

“I thought I was done with you!” Steven complained.

Howls of pain and rage emanated from the cracks in space. Steven, having had more than enough of that, jumped into the hole. Immediately, the blank dreamscape vanished, and he was in the new dream. He floated in towards the dead star, watching the _Molten Core_ ’s wreckage each time it passed, his eyes searching for details. The closer he got, the vaster the black hole seemed to be, its massive size occluding the starry space behind it, compressing the light to a thin ring that marked what could be called its edge.

Willing himself forward with a thought, he flew in towards the wreckage until he was close enough to grab a piece as it whipped by. Thanks to the cartoonish physics of the dream, he accelerated instantly to the speed of the ship, letting him wander the wreckage in the _Molten Core’s_ reference frame. The ship was over-empty, under-detailed, more like a life-size model than the actual thing. The closer he got to the front of the ship, though, the more detailed things became.

Wandering all the way to the cockpit, and then clambering out the missing viewscreen, Steven saw a trail of wreckage laid out like a discontinuous path towards the edge of the black hole. At the end of the path were some familiar-looking figures. He jumped out of the ship and floated down towards them.

Peridot was the closest of the three figures. She stood like a wax statue, reaching down the path with a desperate hand. Her frozen face was full of fear as she looked out at the scene ahead of her. There, Steven saw Connie and… himself. He floated over to watch.

The dream-Steven was squatting balanced on a piece of debris, reaching down his hand for Connie, who was hanging onto a piece closer to the black hole, holding it close to her chest like a life preserver. They were both falling down, closer and closer to the event horizon, with Connie’s left leg stretched out like a piece of putty, a nearly comically long string reaching down towards the darkness. Dream-Steven was saying something, indistinct and incoherent.

“We can make it, if I… I can go, you just…” He mumbled. “Don’t move, I’ll be… heal you… be fine…”

Connie was shouting back at him, as if her heard everything he was saying and more with perfect clarity.

“No, don’t!” She insisted. “Just go back! It’s too late, just… go! You don’t need to die! You have to get out of here!”

This interchange kept up for several seconds as Steven floated in closer to Connie. She seemed more detailed than the rest of the dream—no, she seemed _real._ Had he wandered into her dream? Or nightmare, as it seemed? As he got close, she turned to him suddenly, and screamed with an amount of anguish he’d only heard once before, in the chambers of White Diamond.

“Nooo!” She cried out. Now that she was looking at him, Steven could see her hazy, unfocused eyes. “Run! Get away!”

Their fall in towards the black hole accelerated suddenly. Steven looked behind them as in half an instant, the black hole’s horizon went from being a curved ring around them to being a small circle above their heads. From there, inside the event horizon, the only light was that which fell in from above.

Connie slumped with a sob.

“It’s too late now,” she cried. “Nothing can escape. We’re doomed.”

“Connie,” Steven said softly, reaching out and touching her shoulder. She jumped at the gentle touch, something electric about it’s comfort. “Connie, we’ll be fine.”

She looked up at him with haze in her eyes.

“No,” she mumbled, somewhere between lucidity and the automatic motions of the dreamer. “We’re done for.”

“Connie, it’s just a dream! You’re breathing in space!” he insisted. “Look at your leg! Why would the black hole only stretch out one?”

In an instant without motion her leg was back to normal. Connie blinked. The tears in her eyes vanished like they were never there.

“Steven?” she asked, as if just waking up.

“Yeah?”

“That’s you? Like, you-you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, sheepish. “Sorry for crashing your dream.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, grimacing. “Wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

“It’s got some pretty parts,” he said, pointing up. Their port-hole to space was pretty for how much of it they could see. It was as if someone had tried to paint the entire universe on the moon on a dark night.

“It’s a bit far away,” Connie said, smiling a bit. “But I see what you mean.”

“It’s only as far away as we want,” he said. “It’s your dream, right?”

“Yeah. One moment,” Connie said, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. She’d been learning lucid dreaming on her own time, knowing it might help her talk with Steven. And beside that, it’d just been interesting. Now that she was lucid, the dream was her oyster.

The world shifted, and they were back home. Back with the ocean breeze, with blue skies, with green slopes. Earth. They looked out at the view, Connie’s memory of the cliff overhang above Steven’s house and the Temple.

“Any luck dreaming to home?” Connie asked.

“I haven’t tried,” Steven said. “I don’t want to tire myself out by accident, right?”

“Right,” Connie said nodding. “I… how much of that dream did you see?”

“A bit of it,” Steven said, shrugging. “I think it meant more to you than to me… dreams can be that way. I just got there running from my own nightmare.”

“Oh?” Connie glanced over to his face, which he kept as stoic as he could manage. “You want to talk about it?”

Steven sighed.

“I mean, it’s not really much to talk about. Just… dreaming about that time I left the Rubies stranded in space. Or really, the time I stranded Eyeball. Except it was weird, and different?” he scratched his head. “She was still cracked. And she spoke really creepily, and crack just kept spreading, and spreading…”

“Huh,” Connie said. “Do you think it means anything?”

“I dunno. Probably not,” Steven said, kicking the grass under his feet. “What about your nightmare?”

“I mean, you saw it.”

“I mean, do you think it means anything?”

“If anything,” Connie said, frowning, “It was a bit too on the nose.”

“I… don’t really follow.”

“Come on, isn’t obvious? The black hole represents _starvation._ ” Connie said. She balled a fist. “We can’t escape it, it’s just… pulling us in.”

“Geeze,” Steven said, quietly. “That’s grim.”

“I mean, yeah,” Connie said, chuckling. “It’s a nightmare.”

“Your nightmares are a lot more thinky than mine,” Steven observed. “I just get ‘blargh, monster!’ Or maybe I just get a gem trying to kill me or something.”

“Yeah. I guess at least I don’t have to deal with that.”

“Are you kidding?” Steven half-grinned at her. “Your nightmares seem _way_ worse. At least mine stop being scary when I wake up.”

“I mean,” Connie figured, quietly, “I don’t know about that.”

“What do you mean?”

Connie bit her lip as she thought. What exactly could she say, that would explain the way she saw Steven jump at sudden touches and hidden movements? How his breath would catch when someone entered the room until he knew who it was? How at most all times, he was terribly, incredibly desperate to never, ever be alone?

“I think,” Connie eventually figured, “That nightmares don’t follow us when we wake up. It’s more like they follow us to bed. We were already scared, or at least worried about them. Our brain just reminds us when we sleep. And not to put too fine a point on it but uh, you have… you have a lot of reason to worry about ‘blargh, monster.’”

Steven thought about it, then nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, thinking back to bad nights with worse nightmares. The nights after fights that came close or went poorly. “Yeah, that checks out.”

“At least when it’s a thinky nightmare,” Connie added, “You get a chance to think about _why_ it scares you. Or maybe, what to do about it.”

“Think of anything, then?” Steven asked.

“Yeah,” Connie said, frowning. “Yeah… I already thought of it earlier, actually. I’m just… not sure.”

“What do you mean? You didn’t bring it up… is it risky?”

“I mean, I don’t think so,” Connie said, tilting her head with a frown. “It’s… kind of the least risky thing I can think of, actually. I’ve already started, and if we don’t need to do it, we can go back at any time.”

“Uh… okay.” Steven’s brow creased, and he turned to study Connie’s face. He was no closer to reading her than before. “I’m uh… I’m kinda worried about how you’re talking around it like this.”

“I’m working myself up to it,” Connie admitted, frowning. “I… I don’t think you’ll like it. Because you’re sweet, and you care for me, and you don’t want to see me get hurt.”

“I mean, yeah? Isn’t that all… good? Connie, what’s going on?”

“If we can work out the water situation… and I think we can,” Connie said, looking to the ground, “I can stop eating now… and we’ll still have two or three weeks to get rescued.”

Steven stared in confused shock as the sky began to darken. In seconds, the sky went from blue to grey, and overcast shadowed the rest of the dream.

“We don’t have to stop eating, w—”

“Just let me finish, Steven!” Connie interrupted. Steven froze in the middle of reaching out for her shoulder.

“Okay,” he said, hoarsely. “Go ahead.”

“Peridot said… that it could take eighty days for them to find us. After they knew about where we were. We have enough food to last two people maybe about a week, probably a bit less. But that food lasts twice as long for one person. So my first thought was, if we both try to live… if we both eat, the chance we both live is pretty small. One week plus three weeks without food is about four weeks. We’d need to be really lucky.” Connie counted out the weeks on her fingers. Her expression was cold, and clinical.

“But if we don’t split our food, focus on making sure one of us lives, that’s another week to that person. We go from no chance of both of us surviving, to _maybe_ one of us living. That was my first thought. Except, then I remembered the time… the time you gave yourself up to the Diamonds, and how you got back then.”

Realization flashed through Steven’s face. He shook his head, trying to believe that Connie was going _anywhere_ but there.

“If we make sure you get all recovered from healing Peridot,” Connie continued, still looking down, looking away from him. “Then if they can’t save us, can’t find us in three weeks… if I don’t make it, in other words… then you can heal me like you healed Lars. And then we _all_ get back. You and Peridot can get back through Lion, and then I can wait for you guys to find me. You… you can even bring parts back through, and fix the nav computer, so we can find the ship.”

Connie took a deep breath, and steeled herself, and looked Steven in the eye.

He looked horrified.

“I…” her voice trembled a bit. “I’m sorry. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Seconds passed silently as a cold breeze passed through the dream.

“No,” Steven eventually said.

“No!” he said again, more strongly. “That’s… that’s awful!”

“I know it’s awful!” Connie said, tearing up a little. “But I can’t think of anything else! Do you have a better plan? Because I’ve been trying!”

“ _Any_ plan is better, Connie!” Steven said, grabbing the sides of his head.

“Both of us dying—permanently—is better?” Connie asked, getting heated. “Because that’s the only alternative I’ve been able to think of!”

“Starving yourself isn’t a plan, Connie!”

“I can take this from a situation where we both die to where we both live,” Connie said. “I just need to—”

“To die! Connie, what if my healing doesn’t work? What if I can’t—”

“It _will_ work, Steven! I know it will, I believe in you! This is a way out!”

“ _No_ , it’s _not!_ ” Steven shouted. “It’s not a way out unless it’s for both of us!”

There was a beat of silence as the heat of the argument began to fade. Steven spoke up again.

“Sorry… for yelling,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Connie said, “I got pretty loud, too.”

There were a few seconds of quiet before either of them said anything.

“I had a similar idea, is the thing,” Steven said, quietly. “I was thinking… that maybe, you should have all the food.”

Connie gaped.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all!” she said. “We need you to get your energy back, so that you can contact home!”

“That shouldn’t take more than a night or so, right?” he said. “After that… I’ve got a gem. I’ve got an energy source that you _don’t_. So I can probably last even longer than a normal human can without food. Maybe forever.”

“You don’t know that, though,” Connie said, in hushed tones. “What if you need _more_ food because of your gem? We can’t risk that, right?”

“It’s better than your suicide-by-starvation plan.”

“It doesn’t get us home,” Connie said. “Even if you’re right, and you don’t need food, five weeks isn’t very close to eighty days. The odds aren’t very good we’ll get found.”

Steven shook his head, then turned around, voice choked. He started to walk away.

“I… I need some space. I can’t talk about this.”

“Wait, no. Steven,” Connie said, reaching out for him. “Steven!”

Steven ran. Connie chased after him, hand stretched out—

 

“Agh!” Connie cried out as she jolted awake in her seat, sending a stinging pain through her leg. Steven turned to her briefly from the doorway before running out the room.

“Steven, wait!” she called after him. He didn’t respond.

“Wait… what?” Peridot looked between Steven’s abandoned sleeping bag and Connie with confusion in her eyes. She was sprawled out across the floor with some of Steven’s art supplies, sketching something out in pencil. “What just happened?”

“Steven and I had an argument,” Connie sighed.

Peridot squinted at her, then back to the bedroll.

“While you were asleep?”

“In a dream,” Connie clarified. “He was in my dream.”

“Oh.”

Peridot tapped her pencil against the paper with nervous frustration.

“An argument? Now?” she asked. “Aren’t we supposed to bond together in this trying moment to overcome the challenges ahead of us?”

“I don’t know where you got that narmy line from,” Connie grumbled. “But it doesn’t always work out that way.”

Peridot decidedly strongly against admitting that she had gotten that line from the Camp Pining Hearts: Survival Island special feature.

Connie, still a bit miffed, rolled over to her right, and grabbing her crutches up off the ground.

“Wait, where are you going?” Peridot half-stood, as Connie began to get out of her chair. “Are you sure that you should be going places on your own?”

“I’m not,” she said, wobbling a bit as she levered herself up and onto her crutches. It hurt, but like most pain, it was manageable. “I’m just going to go talk with Steven. We need to work this out.”

“Right! I’ll go with you!” Peridot declared.

“Talk with him alone, Peridot,” Connie said.

“Oh,” Peridot flopped back onto the floor with a huff. “Let me know when you work it out, I guess.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Connie said, hefting her heavy crutches to clack-clatter her way across the floor.

“And don’t fall over!” Peridot called after her, as she left through the same door Steven had.

 

“Steven!” Connie called out as she reached the first intersection in the hallway. She didn’t think that he’d gone into Pod 1, but she wanted to be sure.

“Hey, Steven?”

Further down the hallway, she saw a familiar head poke out just opposite to Pod 2. Steven had been sat in the indent that the main-level airlock was set in, and on seeing Connie so far from the cockpit on her own, he came running. Connie started to heave herself forward on the heavy crutches, but he signaled for her to stay still.

“Connie, what are you doing?” he said. “You shouldn’t be out here! Not without some to—”

“If you didn’t want me to follow you,” she panted, smiling a bit, “You probably shouldn’t have left.”

“I didn’t think you’d—” he started to put his hands to his head again, but then looked up at her with a moment of realization.

“Ugh,” he groaned. “You _would_ limp after me on a bad leg, though. I should have known.”

“You say that like you wouldn’t,” Connie pointed out. “But I’m pretty sure you would.”

“I… I mean, maybe! But I’m magic,” Steven protested. “That makes it different.”

“Sure,” Connie said, rolling her eyes.

“Okay, fine,” he said, sighing. “I’ll keep my moping in the cockpit, then. Let’s just head back, and—”

“No,” Connie said, shaking her head. “Let’s talk this out first.”

“What is there to talk about?” Steven said, defeatedly. “You’ve decided to starve yourself, and I can’t exactly stop you. I mean, I could not eat too, but if both of us do that, that seems like it’d be…”

“Counterproductive?” Connie suggested.

“Melodramatic,” Steven corrected. “This whole thing has been melodramatic, really.”

“I—” Connie started to argue the point, but then really thought about it. “Oh. Huh. I guess it has been a bit melodramatic. The intense nightmare, leading to a big reveal in a dream… high stakes…”

“Unnecessary self-sacrifice,” Steven inserted, thinking his own words through further. “I mean, think about it, we’re arguing over which of us should starve ourselves. That’s like… completely over the top, huh?”

Connie slumped against the side of the hallway, looking up at one of the pale lights in the ceiling as she thought.

And then she started snickering.

“Oh my gosh,” she realized. “This is just like a… we’re acting like kids, but worse. We’re acting like _movie teenagers._ Like, _bad_ movie teenagers, who yell at each other in horror movies while they’re the last ones left.”

Steven chuckled a little, and wiped away a tear with a sniff. The release in tension was palpable.

“Yeah, I guess so, huh? I mean, it kind of makes sense, though, right? We’re tired, and hurt…”

“And scared, and hungry,” Connie followed up.

“Really scared,” Steven added on. “This is… this is kind of really scary. I’m worried we won’t get out of this.”

Connie turned her attention away from the ceiling, and the two looked into each other’s eyes. While good humor might have returned to them, there was no mistaking the quiver they saw in each other’s gaze. The desperation, indeed, the fear.

“Yeah,” she agreed, hesitantly. “Yeah, I’m worried we might not make it, too. Heck, I’m a little worried even if we do make it.”

“What? Why?”

“Mom’s gonna be worried sick.”

That was enough to pull another giggle out of the pair.

“We’ll figure out what to do about the food situation after we eat,” Connie said. “We’re _definitely_ not going to think of anything clever on an empty stomach.”

“Yeah,” Steven said, nodding slowly. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

He was feeling better, but something still felt off, to him. There just… still some part of him that was missing some sort of catharsis, but he couldn’t place it or explain it. Connie, reading it in his face, knew just what to say.

“…Want a hug first?”

Steven hardly spared a thought in walking up to her and squeezing tight. He buried his face in her shoulder, and Connie let her chin rest in his hair as she adjusted herself to lean on him rather than the wall. Her crutches clattered together as she returned his squeeze.

“We’re gonna be fine,” Connie said, quietly. She wasn’t sure that she believed it, but Steven felt her wiry arms, whipcord-strong around him like a grounding wire, like an anchor to his thoughts adrift, and he believed it.

“We’re going to be fine,” he repeated back, mumbling it into her shoulder. And Connie felt the practiced restraint of his embrace, the tenderness that let even overwhelming strength be comfortable, the care in his soft hands, and then she believed it too.

 

As Steven’s gem began to glow, they lost track of who was who.

 

One of them—both of them?—asked a question. They could not remember if the words were spoken, or thought, or simply known.

_“Why would you try to sacrifice yourself? For me?”_

_“No, for me. It was selfish. I’m sorry.”_

_“But why?”_

_“Because I’d never be able to watch you suffer like that. I’d give anything, just not to watch that.”_

 

“Ow!” Stevonnie winced in pain as they came into being, the glow stopping. “Ow ow ow!”

The splint around their left leg was much, much too small, and much too tight. The reached down to untie it, but in their hurry and frustration, simply tore it off by accident instead. They breathed a sigh of relief.

“Hey,” they realized, wiggling the toes on their left foot experimentally. “That’s not so bad.”

Carefully, ever so carefully, they shifted their injured leg. It hurt, but it wasn’t broken or near-broken like Connie’s was. Gently, they set it down, and tried to put some weight on it. Stevonnie hissed in pain as they evaluated it. It was walkable, but not _comfortable._ It was better overall, though, and that’s what mattered. They quickly reshaped one of the crutches into something more like a walking stick for their height, and started limping back up the hallway to the cockpit.

Stevonnie’s stomach grumbled as they neared the cockpit.

“Oh right,” they were reminded. “I should eat. I guess me eating’s a bit more convenient than two people… eating…”

The fairly obvious efficiency of ‘one fusion eating’ versus ‘two growing kids eating’ smashed Stevonnie in the head like a brick through a window. They paused in front of the cockpit’s threshold, and let their head _donk_ against the entryway at how mindnumblingly simple it seemed. And then they started giggling, a pure and hiccuping laughter that filled the room like a pleasant breath of air.

Peridot had never heard that laugh before, but the pure joy of it was enough that she was only mildly cautious in getting up to inspect the culprit. Her mouth dropped as she saw the fusion in the doorway.

“You’re _huge!_ ” she squeaked.

“In retro—” Stevonnie cut themself off with another round of giggles.

“In retrospect, I’m _obvious,_ ” they finished, grinning. “I solve a lot of problems, here.”

Peridot saw Steven’s shirt. Peridot saw Connie’s jacket. She still could hardly believe the person wearing them.

“You should be _impossible,_ ” she said, equal parts frustrated, amazed, impressed. “Humans and gems shouldn’t be able to fuse!”

“It’s not my first time,” they bragged, holding out a hand for Peridot. “I don’t think we’ve actually technically met, before. Not like this. I’m Stevonnie.”

Peridot took their hand, and shook it with a growing smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter's a week late! It ended up being... really huge. As in, it's 30% the size of the entire rest of the fic. I'll try to make up for this chapter being a week late by still posting the new chapter next Saturday, but no promises (other than my one promise that next chapter will *definitely* be shorter).
> 
> If you're a Stevonnie fan, rejoice, because Stevonnie's going to be here for the indefinite future. If you're (somehow) not a Stevonnie fan, there's still more Steven and Connie content in the flashback chapters to come.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

“Wait, will this take out the gravity, too?”

Peridot put a finger to her chin. “I mean, we could turn it off just in this pod, if we wanted. That might make moving things easier, but… well, I wasn’t planning on it.”

“No, no!” Stevonnie gave an uncomfortable laugh, then resumed the process of tearing off the deck panel that Peridot had directed them towards. “No, we should absolutely leave the gravity on.”

“Agreed! We don’t want to have any parts float off or anything. And we don’t want you to misplace your lunch.”

“It’s ‘lose your lunch.’”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“When it comes to idioms, semantics matter,” Stevonnie said. “But I’m not worried about that as much as—nrah!” The deck panel came off with a creaking pop as Stevonnie levered their makeshift walking stick against it. They shifted the inch-thick metal to the side with a clatter. 

“Woo! Got it! Easy-peasy.”

“As…?” Peridot gestured for them to finish. 

“As this would be the  _ wrong _ pod to drop the gravity in,” Stevonnie said, nodding their head in the direction of the stern-side lift tub. The lift tubes had large, curved doors on each deck, that could be closed from any floor to make an airtight seal: the primary purpose was to prevent atmosphere loss in the case of a hull breach, or to hermetically seal sensitive cargo.

Peridot took a second to remember why the half of the lift tubes were sealed on the lower decks of Pod 1, then turned a shade greener than usual.

“Ah. Yes. This is the poop deck.”

“That’s not what a poop deck  _ actually _ is.”

“Isn’t this—”

“This  _ is _ the deck with the poop on it, yes.”

“I rest my case,” Peridot said, crouching down to inspect the guts of the ship Stevonnie had just revealed. “Do you have a light?”

“Uh, yeah, actually…” Stevonnie fumbled in their pockets until they found their pocket flashlight—actually a keychain flashlight, but Connie had wisely elected to leave her keys at home—and held it low for Peridot. “Just hold the button down.”

Peridot lit it experimentally.

“A diode!” she cackled approvingly. “Who says human technology is rubbish?”

“You.”

“Well, can you blame me? You’re so primitive!” she squeaked in false exasperation, then snickered as she took her light into the underbelly of the pod. The crawlspace under the deck was nearly enough for her to stand up in, so she fell the rest of the way in with a grunting roll.

“Aha!” she cried out as her light swept across what she was looking for. A small bluish crystalline heart, about twice the size of a human fist. “We’re in luck! I’ll have the power off in only a moment!”

“Hey, wait!” Stevonnie banged their walking-steel against the deck to get Peridot’s attention before she crawled off. A key-lime tuft of hair sprouted from the floor as Peridot peeked back at them. 

“We aren’t building the water purifier on this floor, are we?” Stevonnie asked.

“Weren’t we going to build it on Deck 4? Or maybe 5?”

“Yeah, that’s my point,” Stevonnie said, “If we cut the power, how are we going to get up there?”

“The lift tubes?” Peridot asked, as if there were no problem.

“Don’t those need power? Also, are we sure we won’t be cutting amy power in the rest of the ship, right?”

“Oh,” Peridot said, slapping her forehead. “Right. Uh… power and gravity are isolated on the newer pods, so we won’t need to worry about cutting power anywhere else, but…”

“How important is it that we get the power off for this?”

“Pretty important,” Peridot said with a grimace. “We could set up the basics, but it’s not particularly safe to tamper with electrics while they’re still on.”

“Right, right. Of course.” Stevonnie bit their lip for a couple of seconds before speaking up again. “I think I’ve got an idea. But you’ll need to give me a bit to set it up. Don’t turn off the power ‘till I’m back.”

 

“You sure you’ll be fine with this?” Peridot whispered, quieted by the dark of the pod. It wasn’t dark in the way night was, because there were no windows, no stars, and no moonlight. It was pitch-black, the absence of light.

Stevonnie grunted affirmatively. They hauled themselves up the rope methodically, breathing consistent and easy. They stopped for a moment, swinging towards the wall and using their good leg to hold themselves steady while they readjusted the coil of rope they’d wrapped about their waist, making sure not too much was hanging loose at any one time. 

“I’ll be honest,” they admitted, “This is basically the best I’ve felt since we’ve gotten stranded.”

“Really?” Peridot clung to the fusion nervously in the total blackness their climbing resumed. Every sway back and forth felt like a shock as she imagined the two of them falling, falling who knows how far to the ground. 

“I find it…  _ unnerving _ .”

“It’s cool,” Stevonnie said. “It’s quiet, and peaceful. And I’ve finally got a full stomach, and uh… well, I just really like climbing things. I wonder if that’s just a me thing, or a human psychology thing. We’re descended from tree-climbers, you know?”

“It’s dark,” Peridot complained. Gems were even less adapted for night vision than humans, on average. After all, they could make light from their gems whenever they wanted.

“You could turn on the flashlight.”

“I… don’t want to waste battery.”

“Suit yourself,” Stevonnie said, shrugging.

They climbed in silence, for a while, before Peridot sighed mournfully.

“I’m really sorry about this mess,” she said. “We really shouldn’t have to worry about… well, any of this.”

“It’s not exactly your fault, is it?”

“If I had been more careful flying this ship, we might not have spun out. And if I had been more careful with my chair, we would have at least gotten to Earth before breaking down.”

“You don’t know any of that,” Stevonnie said, quietly. “And even if it’s true that there’s something you could have done, there’s no sense beating yourself up about it.”

“You don’t  _ learn _ anything without acknowledging your mistakes,” Peridot grumbled.

“That doesn’t mean you have to blame yourself for them. There’s so many things that could have prevented us from being in this situation, that counting them doesn’t really mean anything at all. I can think of at least two times where either Steven or Connie might have been able to stop this, before we even landed on Hessonite’s colony. But if we worry about them, that does us no good.”

“I guess,” Peridot muttered, before tilting her head in confusion. “Wait, two? I can’t think of  _ two _ .”

“Well, we could have chosen not to go,” Stevonnie said. “But I guess that’s kind of cheating, because I don’t regret that at all. Somebody needed to see what Hessonite was up to. I guess what I’m saying is, we could have prepared more, maybe asked Blue Diamond for a bit more information or some kind of help. Be a bit more cautious, you know?”

“I thought of that, too,” Peridot said. “But I can’t think of any other time?”

“There was a red flag when we were flying in…” Stevonnie said, closing their eyes as the memory came to them from two perspectives at once.

* * *

 

“Woah,” Connie said quietly, leaning in as close as she could to the front viewshield. “That’s  _ awesome _ !”

The  _ Sun Incinerator _ was in parking orbit above Hessonite’s colony, but Connie was drawn even more to the great blue-banded gas giant that loomed above the moon as they waited for landing clearance.

“I know, right?” Lars chuckled, walking over from his captain’s seat to get a better look. “Although… I don’t know it’s that great. Maybe I’m just biased, but I think that Saturn’s prettier.”

Steven and Connie turned to him as one.

“Oh my gosh, why didn’t we visit  _ Saturn _ on the way here?” Connie realized eyes wide. 

“Or all the planets!” Steven chipped in, giddy. “We have a  _ spaceship _ !”

“We can do a flyby on the way back,” Garnet said, chuckling. “For now, let’s focus on the mission.”

“I liked Jupiter more,” Padparadscha interjected.

The bridge of the  _ Sun Incinerator _ was a bit crowded, but there was still plenty of room to maneuver. It was easier to count who  _ hadn’t _ come than who had—of the Off-Colors and the Crystal Gems, only Flourite, Rhodonite, and Lapis had elected to remain on Earth. Flourite had stayed because her size would prove cumbersome to hide in the case that anyone came aboard the ship, Rhodonite had ‘had enough danger for this decade,’ and Lapis simply didn’t have the energy. (“Call me if you need anything though,” she’d joked.)

The comm-unit chirped to life as a message came up from the colony.

“Alright!” Rutile cheered.

“Fantastic,” Rutile agreed.

“We’re cleared for landing.”

“Docking Bay 5.”

“Great work.” Lars said, nodding to them. “Alright, take us in!”

The ship sliced through the hazy blue atmosphere of the moon, de-orbiting with minimal re-entry burn while the overengineered engines of the  _ Sun Incinerator _ did their magic. As they cruised above blue oceans and purple-blue jungles of alien trees, Bismuth stirred from the other side of the ship.

“Hold up,” she said, confused. “Did you say,  _ docking bay  _ 5?”

“Docking bay 5,” Rutile confirmed.

“As opposed to?” Rutile asked.

“Hangar 5,” Bismuth suggested, brows furrowing. “Or platform 5. Docking bays are for carriers or drydocks, and they  _ definitely _ don’t have a carrier down there. But… they shouldn’t have a drydock, either.”

“What’s wrong with a drydock?” Connie asked. “I mean, it makes sense for a colony to be able to build its own ships and boats.”

“A colony this size?” Bismuth asked incredulously, scanning through the report summary. “No way! This is a mining colony. They should have gem production and  _ ground-based _ industry, not a flakin’  _ drydock. _ ”

“Bismuth!” Pearl hissed. “Language!”

“Erm.” Bismuth said, glancing over to the two kids and clearing her throat. “Point is, you can get your spacecraft from another, more developed colony. You’d only have a drydock if you wanted to build—”

“Military craft,” Padparscha broke in. Everyone looked over in shock, not so much at her statement but the timeliness of it. 

“I’m reading two high-energy signatures from the colony mainstructure,” she continued, oblivious. “Military-grade reactor units.”

Right on queue, the colony crested the horizon. A mess of radioactive-green situated on a grey gash through the purple landscape. There were two main landmarks, noticed in order of height as they came into view.

“Look at the size of that tower!” Amethyst muttered in awe. The ship’s crew tensed notably on seeing it.

“That’s no tower,” Lars said, gravely. “That’s an anti-orbital artillery projector. We saw one on Celphis-9. If we held still, they could hit us at twenty light-seconds out. Their potshots might splash us even if we’re dodging at five.”

* * *

 

“The cannon,” Stevonnie said. “We should have started planning a way to bail as soon as we saw that cannon. That was way out of place.”

“Would it really have changed our plan?” Peridot asked. “Could we have gotten away from that ship?”

* * *

 

A ripple of shock passed through the bridge as the drydock came into view, a towering hexagonal structure with a number of spires and platforms protruding from it. More notable than the drydock, though, was the giant ship protruding from it. It hung out of one side of the hexagon like a solid green hunk of crystal, lightly textured and lustrous like emerald. Veins of yellow ran across it in digital patterns, and weapons blistered across the surface on pivotal points.

“What the  _ heck _ is  _ that _ doing there?” Lars shrieked.

“Holy cow!” Connie said. “It’s huge!”

“That’s got to be half the size of Beach City,” Steven said under his breath.

“Looks bigger to me,” she muttered back.

Bismuth shook her head.

“I don’t know what a peewee colony like this needs a light cruiser for,” she said, quietly. “But I don’t like it.”

 

A flashing light above one of the docking bays beckoned them. Rutile took a deep breath, and guided the ship in.

* * *

 

“We snuck away even when our ruse failed,” Stevonnie grunted. “If we were planning an escape from the beginning… maybe we could have all left on the  _ Sun Incinerator, _ and all gotten home safely.”

“Maybe,” Peridot said, quietly. She cleared her throat and chippered up, though.

“But! There’s no use dwelling on it, right?”

Stevonnie chuckled and shook their head.

“Guess not, huh?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to E350, CoreyWW, citrusella, realfakedoors, and everyone else who's helped me with beta-reading. I'm trying to post a fic that updates regularly for once, and to that end, I built up a bit of a backlog of chapters before posting this one.
> 
> Chapters completed, but not posted: 0 (D:).


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